A New Service from Wolfram|Alpha: Personal Analytics for Facebook

If you’re a Facebook user, even a casual one, it’s very likely that you’ll also quickly become a Wolfram|Alpha user. Those of you who teach about social media here’s something else that will grab the attention of students. The following new service is free.
Wow!
From an Extended Wolfram|Alpha Blog Post by Steven Wolfram:

Today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data. Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains; now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics. And this is just the beginning; over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities.
It’s pretty straightforward to get your personal analytics report: all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website.
If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll be prompted to authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha (yes, it’s free). And as soon as you’ve done that, Wolfram|Alpha will immediately get to work generating a personal analytics report from the data it can get about you through Facebook.

What Can You Learn From Your Personal Analytics Report?

+ Geographic and Gender Distribution of Friends
+ Age Distribution (For those Who Provide Age that Data Point)
+ Distribution of Activity on Your Facebook Account
+ Facebook Apps Used
+ Number of Items You’ve Liked
+ Word Cloud of Words Used in Posts
+ Most Popular Names of Friends
+ Visualization of Your Network
and much much more.
Make sure to take a look at Steven Wolfram’s complete blog post for MUCH MORE about the data that you can access!
Btw, while you’re on the Wolfram|Alpha site make sure to spend some time taking a look at the many other resources and types of info this tool offers. I’ve said it before and will say it again, Facebook users or not, Wolfram|Alpha is an essential resource for many types of users including information professionals.
Update: I’ve been having trouble accessing the service. I’m sure it’s very busy. (-:

Filed under: Data Files, Patrons and Users