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Analyzing Your Friend Network

As we have been discussing in lecture, creating networks based on data generated from social networking sites and analyzing them is hugely important for the growth, development, and improvement of these sites. It allows engineers and consultants to look at their systems in an objective way and hypothesize possible improvements. However, at the same time this data is simply fun  to look at and examine on a personal level! Wolfram Alpha is one of the kings of data in the current internet world (as well as a saving grace for anyone trying to solve complex math problems) and they have personally tackled Facebook data analytic.

The analyses done on your personal life, given the data stored on Facebook API, are immensely fascinating to look at. They cover everything from basic demographic information about yourself and your friends, to analyses of the popularity of your posts, and graphs of your usage of Facebook in general. This sort of data analysis can give one an introspective look at their life that they don’t usually get the chance to do or take the time to do. Furthermore, they can generate extremely interesting friend cloud networks, as we’ve been examining in class.

In this image you can clearly see the various clusters of this persons life, color coded and segregated to outline these different groups. Images such as these can be eye opening for a person and in the end are just a pleasure to look at and examine. The ability to manifest one’s social life into a diagram is a very cool thought, as these aspects of our lives usually exist in an intangible state within our minds and lives. Unfortunately, as of recently, these types of graphs are no longer able to be generated by Wolfram Alpha, at least for the time being. Facebook recently changed their API format in order to “protect their users” and the information necessary to generate these kinds of awesome friend clouds is no longer readily accessible unless these people have the Wolfram Alpha app installed (which they surely do not). I personally am saddened by the change because I had generated one long ago, maybe freshman year, and this class had reminded me of its existence and I had hoped to generate another one to see how much my social network and life has changed since all those years ago. This is simply another example of how graphical representations of the intangible can provide a benefit for people. Hopefully in the near future, there will exist a safe way to disseminate this sort of information publicly and allow for people to gain an introspective look into their own social lives.

 

Link to Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics Report

Link to recent article detailing the changes to Facebook’s API

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