> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website.<p>.. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (which is nice by the way).
Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else?<p>Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach.<p>Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.
Here's the direct link to try it out: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report</a><p>As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.
This is the kind of thing they need to get into. Data that lots of people care about, data for the masses, rather than obscure details on bolt sizes or ancient currencies. "Compute things people want".<p>I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product comparisons.
Ah, where did I see the word 'knowledge domain' before? Here: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...</a>
I can't access it now, alpha is very being slow.<p>The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllolmdbdgeggionole" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...</a>
Like the author I'm also not really active on Facebook, but I found the clustering of friends particularly insightful.<p>I can see this extending to Twitter, Linked in and so on, combining everything into a dynamic scorecard. This is what Klout should have been.<p>(Personal blog post showing clustering: <a href="http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network/" rel="nofollow">http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network...</a>)
Like Wolfram, I've been doing some personal analytics for a while, but only with email (<a href="http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph" rel="nofollow">http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph</a>). Potentially it would be possible to build a Friendica addon which does similar things to the Facebook Report.
Just... wow.<p>I love what Wolfram Alpha is doing with data-based search results. So innovative and a natural search space that Google is only dipping their toes into.
It seems concerning that my personal information can be so easily summed up and displayed in easily digestible format. I'm not sure if you can view other people's Wolfram Alpha Facebook summaries, or what data they could be collecting about me... However, here is one study that demonstrates that your sexual orientation can be determined just by analyzing your Facebook friends.<p><a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2611/2302" rel="nofollow">http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...</a>
Wow, the coolest part (in my opinion) is the Friend Network section at the bottom. It accurately mapped and clustered every section of my life, including my first high school, the high school I moved to after that, my college, my family, various work groups and social groups, etc. Very interesting to see visually.
This is interestingly non-viral. Although it's one of the coolest links I've seen in a while, it takes much longer to "consume" this, and sharing doesn't have until after consumption. Interesting to note how much less frequently this was shared than some much interesting "popular links".
I really liked the Facebook report from Wolfram Alpha. Logging in was pretty easy for me because I already have a Wolfram log-in. I started the process just before a family meeting and walk with my wife, and less than an hour after I started, I see on screen a DETAILED analysis of my heavy use of Facebook, with a lot of information I've been looking for--for example who is the person who comments the most on my wall, or which post that I ever posted has had the most comments. (Hmm, the link referred to in that post belongs HN if it hasn't been posted before.)<p>On the whole, it is more user-friendly than Facebook itself for telling me about my activity and connections on Facebook, so I'm glad I signed up for the Facebook report on Wolfram Alpha.
Very soon, Facebook needs to get to a point where when you log in it would ask you "what is your target mood: happy, stimulated to do more work, disturbed, relax,happy" and would tailor what you see and do based on past analytics.
This just made personal search a very interesting space.<p>Put aside for a moment the fact that you're giving your personal data to (yet another) third party. Imagine you tie all your social online stuff to a service that's good at aggregating/displaying the data from each one. Now I could have a 'dashboard' of my online life as well as being able to query it (e.g when/how did I last interact with Alice or Bob?).<p>I don't know how good Alpha actually is but if I take the visualisations on faith, then I'm interested to know where they're headed. If I were a startup in the personal data/aggregation space, I'd be paying very close attention.
Not bad, the friend network clustering was pretty good (clustered using mutual friends). You can clearly see clusters of people from each place I've worked, the neighborhood I live in, my school friends etc. each in almost their own cluster (and when they aren't neatly organized, there's a very good reason why, like people who moved between jobs with me...aggregating both clusters together).<p>Strangely, it gets my place of residence wrong.
I really want to use this service and check out the interesting data it generates. But I don't really want to give away all my data to WolframAlpha. It says 'Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.' but I am not really sure. It's encouraging me to come back and let it continuously mine it? I am conflicted.
I am not sure how many have seen <a href="http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com</a> by Linkedin Labs. The graph is much more neater, zoomable, and shows quirky insights about your network.
I have a small bug with it: I set my city in my Facebook profile and Wolfram Alpha says I'm in a city with the same name but in France. But the map shows the right city.
Not only is the analytical part super neat, but this is an absolutely brilliant way to get people to find out about Wolfram Alpha and create an account.
Have to love those people with ages of 99 years.<p>(At least they deal with the "hide my birth year" people correctly instead of saying they are 1-year-old.)
related: anyone know any good platforms for collecting personal data so you can make cool graphs like this? i use google spreadsheet right now, but im not a fan.