What is WolframAlpha doing on Facebook?  Why, it’s parsing your data and making it it pretty while it fascinates.  I love this word cloud mixup of “Davidescu Boles” and “David Gordon” all sitting there scrambled and brewing together in a “today” slurry of “reviews” “stories” “wonders” and “google jazz reports” — I love visual data!

If you want WolframAlpha to parse all your public and private Facebook bits, just go there and type in “facebook” for your search term.  Then, when the Facebook button appears, click it, give WolframAlpha permission to use your Facebook data, and you’re good to go!

The anticipation builds as WolframAlpha digs deep into your Facebook status updates and friendships.  Minutes pass…

When the parsing is finished, you’ll be presented with a long list of different data points.  Some topics include how many Likes you have on certain topics and you’ll get the gender breakdown of your friends.   I have 52% Male friends and 47% female friends. 43% of my friends are married and 33% are single.  My friends range in age from 14 to 105.  I have a lot of friends who are 105 — so that must be the top-allowed fudge date for people who really don’t want the Facebook world to know how old they really are..

Here is my “Most Liked Post:”

Here a quantified look at my status updates parsed by day of the week and time of day.

Here are my friends by country:

country | number of friends
United States | 752  (43.7%)
India | 235  (13.6%)
Germany | 138  (8%)
United Kingdom | 92  (5.3%)
Philippines | 51  (3%)
other | 454  (27.1%)
(1058 cities , 379 states , 85 countries)
(based on 1722 of 5381 friends)

Most common friend first names:

Michael (42)  |  David (36)  |  John (31)  |  Mark (29)  |
Richard (21)  |  ...
(based on 4716 of 5381 friends)

It’s pretty fun to sift through all the Facebook data points.  You really get a feel for your place in the world and a good sense of how the world views you.

If you decide to give WolframAlpha permission to parse your Facebook data, come back here and post a comment and share with us the most interesting facts you learned about your Facebook life that most surprised you.

11 Comments

      1. We tag each other when we see things the other person would find amusing. Sort of a tit-for-tat. I don’t have that kind of relationship with most anyone else.

        1. Ha! I was imagining status updates like…

          “Chad is still sleeping on my couch!”

          or

          “Chad is still brewing trouble at Starbucks!”

          or

          “I tricked Chad today when he wanted a drink of my tea! I pretended to pour some of mine into his sippy cup and he drank it like he owned it!”

  3. **Male: 52%
    **Female: 47%
    **3 People who apparently are over 100 yrs old 🙂

    country | number of friends
    United States | 256 (80.3%)
    Canada | 8 (2.5%)
    Indonesia | 6 (1.9%)
    Israel | 6 (1.9%)
    Australia | 4 (1.3%)
    other | 39 (12.1%)
    (241 cities , 85 states , 28 countries)
    (based on 319 of 857 friends)

    I saved my word cloud, but I have no idea how to post a link to it here……. I will share it on my FB page tho

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