Facebook is definitely full of a lot of nonsense. But, it does have value in certain areas. I am on Facebook every day. For me, while it’s good to stay in touch with friends and family, it’s also a good marketing tool. I have gotten a substantial amount of business because of my presence on Facebook.
Recently I came across a process by which you can find out a LOT of detailed information about your Facebook account. I found this to be really interesting, which is why I’m passing it along to you today.
Note – I didn’t say a lot of information about you. This isn’t about the issue of spying by the government, Facebook, Google, etc. This pertains to highly detailed information about your Facebook account.
To take advantage of this, you will be using a service at a website called WolframAlpha (wolframalpha.com). At first glance, it might appear to be just another search engine like Google. But it is far more than that. WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine. There are LOTS of things it can do that are pretty amazing. But today we’re going to see what it can do with your Facebook account.
The first step is to go to the WolframAlpha website, and in the search field type Facebook report.
Next up you will see a button that says “Analyze my Facebook Data”. Click that.
Then you have to click Okay to tell Facebook that WolframAlpha has permission to look at your Facebook account:
Next – create a WolframAlpha ID (basically a free account) by filling in a short form with some information and a created password:
Then click “Generate my Report”, and the next screen will show a progress bar as the data loads.
Now the fun begins!
The report is displayed all on one long scrollable page. It starts off pretty simple by displaying your Facebook profile picture, your date of birth (including the day of the week – I was born on a Tuesday). It also told me that there are 5 months and 9 days until my next birthday.
Then it showed stats about my activity. How many times I have posted a link, how many statuses I have created, and how many photos and videos I have uploaded. All of these numbers are visually displayed in both bar graphs and pie charts. It even breaks it down to how much I do each thing on certain days of the week:
It even analyzed each of the last 400 posts and created a word cloud. In a word cloud, the bigger the word is, the more times you used it. Apparently I like to use the word “computer”.
It told me which photo I uploaded to Facebook that got the most comments. This was the “Family photo from Christmas 2011” that we did, which got 40 comments. Here’s the picture (this is me with my wife and 2 kids):
I can also see that I have more female Facebook friends than male:
And most of my friends are married:
Want to know where your friends are located? Most of mine are in the US, as expected.
There are more graphs and stats on other aspects of your Facebook account, but I’ll let you go find them on your own.
