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Wolfram's New Facebook Report

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Sun, 2012-09-02 19:53 — kohta

Everyone talks about the possibilities of exploiting the goldmine of personal information that Facebook has collected over the years. Many mobile and web apps dig into the pool of their users' information, but Wolfram Alpha's new Facebook Report function, as briefly explained in CNN Tech's article. The report is expansive, to say the least; everything from activity frequency to friends' birthplaces shows up in Wolfram's familiar charts and graphs. Even without any information about what kind of queries Wolfram used, one can imagine the mountains of data traversed, processed, and organized into this neat little report.


The report is essentially an organization system for information about Facebook users and their friends. The types of information spans an entire spectrum that includes basic profile information, mutual friends, post counts, like counts, and various user interactions, not to mention metadata about each of these elements. This report can only be one of countless ways that this information could have been organized, but as it is, it serves its purpose of giving the user a simple but informative summary of their Facebook life.

One of the impressive features about this report is that it is relatively fast for the amount of information it collects. While for now, this is just a one-time analysis of archival data, it would be interesting if Wolfram or some other application adapted this into a real-time report about users' Facebook activity.