Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep Into Facebook Data 70
Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in January, when Wolfram Alpha launched an updated version of its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, the self-billed 'computational knowledge engine' asked users to contribute their detailed Facebook data for research purposes. The researchers at Wolfram Alpha, having crunched all that information, are now offering some data on how users interact with Facebook. For starters, the median number of 'friends' is 342, with the average number of friends peaking for those in their late teens before declining at a steady rate. Younger people also have a tendency to largely add Facebook friends around their own age — for example, someone who's 20 might have lots of friends in the twenty-something range, and comparatively few in other decades of life—while middle-aged people tend to have friends across the age spectrum. Beyond that, the Wolfram Alpha blog offers up some interesting information about friend counts (and 'friend of friend' counts), how friends' networks tend to 'cluster' around life events such as school and sports teams, and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older — as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics. 'It feels like we're starting to be able to train a serious "computational telescope" on the "social universe,"' the blog concluded. 'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'"
True Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
This should replace elections. And elected officials. Measure the real people's publicly-stated opinions and rule from that.
Replace all corrupted clowns chosen by rigged popularity contests with math. Math can be trusted. Public data can be verified. Anything short of "free to know for everyone everywhere forever" has no place in public policy space.
That is all.
Common sense (Score:0, Insightful)
'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'
Uhh no. You haven't "discovered" anything. In fact you've discovered nothing. All of this is - COMMON FUCKING SENSE -. You don't need wolfram alpha to tell us as people age they talk less about video and more about politics, because PEOPLE BECOME ADULTS, DURRRRRRRRRR. You don't need wolfram alpha to tell us that "Friends' networks tend to cluster around life events".. ITS COMMON FUCKING SENSE.
Why am I wasting my time typing this?
Real Research (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck trying to get a report like this from facebook.com or the like...too bad, that...this data is very useful.
This is real research. Rigorous, cleanly factorized, unbiased, work shown for others to check.
In companies today, this kind of thing doesn't happen often. Usually, there is an 'economic' pressure on the results. Everything is filtered through a 'context' of who will see the report and what they will do after they see it. People's jobs are on the line.
If companies want to **truly** use 'big data' to make better business decisions, they have to start with work like this, then know how to use it. That comes with experience ;)