Analyze Your Facebook Life With Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics

Wolfram Alpha, the self-styled computational knowledge engine, has launched a new service that allows anybody to gain deep insight into their social life on Facebook. The new “personal analytics” takes your Facebook data and in a remarkably short time converts it into a series of mathematical graphs that shows things like how many of your friends are married or single, how many of them share a common name, who has the most number of mutual friends, who leaves the most comments on your post, as well as details about your own social habits like at what time of the day you are most active and much much more.

To try it, simply go to Wolfram Alpha's website, type in "Facebook report". You will be asked to connect your Facebook account to the Wolfram Alpha app. Once these permissions are granted, Wolfram Alpha digs into your Facebook account and draws out a seriously long report about you. Depending on how active you are on Facebook, the report can be as along as a book, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc. Even if you use Facebook occasionally, Wolfram Alpha will still produce a report at least half a dozen pages long.

Here are some of the interesting stuff that you can find.

• What was the weather like when you were born.

  

• Your Facebook activity by date and time. You can clearly see what kind of messages you posted (text, images, links) and when.

  

• Word cloud of your most used words in statuses.

  

• Which of your posts or photos are most liked, at what times, and by whom.

  

• Relationship distribution of your friends.

  

• Your whole network of friends can actually be shown and analyzed as a network. The big dot at the center is you and each other dot represents a friend, arranged based on mutual friendships. The size of each dot is proportional to the number of friends from my network that that person has.

  

What you see is the report is only the tip of the iceberg. You can change the parameters, expands results, and interact with the charts in multitude of ways to drill down into deeper layers of computation and analysis. You can even click the name of a friend to run the full page analysis on that friend's shared Facebook data.

Wolfram Alpha’s personal analytics is just a reminder how much Facebook knows about you and your friends.