What's on your mind?

[Pangloss]

An interesting post from Facebook's staff on Thursday shows statistics on user posts. Facebook looked at about 1 million English-language status updates, filtering them against a collection of 68 keywords and then correlating the data against two factors: User age, and number of friends.

 

This graphic shows the results:

 

 

Facebook's assessment:

 

The chart on left confirms the typical stereotypes about younger and older people. Younger people express more negative emotions (including anger) and swear more. They use more pronouns referring to oneself (“I”, “my”, etc.) and talk more about school. Older people write longer updates, use more prepositions and articles, and talk more about other people, including their family.

 

Word usage of more “popular” people also differs from people with a lower friend count. People with more friends tend to use more of the pronoun “you” and other second person pronouns. They write longer updates, and use more words referring to music and sports. More "popular" people also talk less about their families, are less emotional overall, use fewer past tense and present tense verbs and words related to time.

 

Also, I thought this bit was interesting:

 

After removing identifiable information from the updates, we had our computers calculate the percentage of words in status updates belonging to each word category (so no human ever read your updates).

 

Makes sense, right? You might have to take a look at some samples to check your algorithm, but you could have the computer remove the names of the samples you pull, so the data stays private.

 

I think it's interesting to see this kind of work being done. 600 million people collecting themselves voluntarily into an organized data set is just a dream come true for all kinds of social research. I think we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg here.

 

Facebook's article here:

 

Interesting analysis by PC Magazine here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374718,00.asp