How To Be Popular On Facebook, Quantified

Hugh Pickens writes "Network World reports that Facebook has just released an analysis of the word usage for about one million status updates from its US English speakers with the words in updates organized into 68 different word categories based on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)--a text analysis software program that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts. The results? To be popular on Facebook all you have to do is write longer status updates, talk about music and sports, don't be overly emotional, don't talk about your family, don't refer to time and use the word 'you' a lot. Facebook's study also confirms something that bloggers and Fox News have known for years: negative comments produce more online activity. Sure, Facebook users might click the like button more often on updates expressing positive emotion. But Facebook found you can't beat negativity for user engagement, as dismal status updates garnered more comments than positive ones."

Re:Yes, absolutely

[hedwards]

Slashdot isn't a social networking site. I'd hazard that only a small portion of the people here actually use the journal, and those that do use it as a way of submitting a short article.

Slashdot is essentially a blog with user submitted articles that people comment on. The only reason why there's a karma sytsem at all is to help filter out the known trolls and crap posters, and it does an alright job of that.

Or in other words, apart from a very superficial, community of people posting on a subject there isn't really a whole lot of similarity.

Re:Yes, absolutely

[hedwards]

No evidence required. It was a response to the GGP's assertion that there was a positive correlation between number of facebook friends and number of real world friends. There is no reasonable basis for the assumption that there was a connection.

It's rather clever of you to turn it into a false dilemma, given that there could be a positive correlation, a negative correlation or no correlation at all. Rather deft of you to ignore that last one.

Popularity contests...

[pongo000]

...are so grade school. Why are people so incredibly self-centered, self-absorbed, and egotistical? Those are exactly the type of people I wouldn't want to have as "friends".