

Facebook knows when you'll break up - brettbender
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/02/facebook.breakups/index.html

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vaporstun
CNN's crappy rip of the image cuts off everything past October losing some of
the most important data (the lead up to the holidays and Christmas Day). They
also cut off the months at the bottom so there's no way to accurately tell
what is happening in what month.

Here is their source site which has a better version:
<http://www.geekosystem.com/facebook-breakup-graph/>

~~~
chronomex
The original source (well, not quite, but I can't find a link to the actual
source) has an even better copy: [http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-
facts-about-face...](http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-about-
facebook-and-breakups/)

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BrandonM
While it's possible that more breakups happen on Monday, I postulate that
Monday is actually just the day that people are most likely to report a
weekend breakup. People who break up aren't rushing to Facebook right away. A
breakup can be a hugely emotional event. If it happens on Friday, Saturday, or
Sunday morning, it is likely to be followed by spending a lot of time with
family, very close friends, or generally being in denial. When Monday comes
around, it's back to the daily grind, it's time to face reality, and telling
everyone you know is one way to come to grips with the situation.

I would also argue that the pre-Christmas spike likely isn't because people
are cheap. I think the main factor is that most people spend the holidays with
family. Two possibilities come to mind: 1) one or both of the people in the
relationship decide that the relationship is not worthwhile enough to take
each other home to Mom and Dad, or 2) meeting the family over Thanksgiving
leads to a breakup (it was awkward, the family didn't like the S.O., the S.O.
didn't like the family, etc.).

All-in-all, I agree with the sentiment of several comments here that between
the poorly-ripped image and the unjustified conclusions they jump to, the
article is mostly crap.

~~~
brianpan
I don't think that's the conclusion anyone is drawing. Most other articles use
the phrase "announced on Monday". The journalist in the TED talk scraped
status updates for "break up" or "broken up". This isn't supposed to be taken
as hard evidence of anything.

~~~
BrandonM
_I don't think that's the conclusion anyone is drawing._

From the article: _Mondays, as if they weren't bad enough, are the most likely
day to break up._

I was referring specifically to the shoddy article and its crap conclusions,
not to the original data. The original data was interesting and potentially
insightful.

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michaelchisari
All this shows is when people are statistically most likely to break up. This
cannot be used to predict a specific situation (ie, "when you'll break up"),
only to generalize about broad data.

~~~
electromagnetic
Ah but it does tell you when to statistically 'work harder' on your
relationship. IE Feb/March and Nov/December.

Although this can be compounded in a different way. The first break-up
mountain appears after Christmas and spikes after valentines, translation: he
buys crappy Christmas presents _and_ he forgets valentines!

The second mountain is in Nov/Dec, translation: I spend all my money on her,
she hasn't bought dinner in three months and now I have to get her a Christmas
present too?!

Interestingly Aug/Sep/Oct were the months I noticed this year that I spent a
vast majority of my time in doors. I'd gotten over the novelty of hot weather
(I work outside) and had been cowering inside, which meant lots of movie
theaters and dinners with the wife.

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kenjackson
I agree that it would be more interesting to predict.

Has anyone taken Facebook data and seen if they could predict suicide or
crime? Do people exhibit certain patterns before committing suicide or
commiting some big crime spree?

It would also be interesting to see if it could determine if someone is
cheating. Of course its harder to get data on when the cheating began to do a
good analysis.

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aasarava
Seems flawed. If all that McCandless did was scrape status updates for "break
up" and "broken up", he may well have included events referring to bands or
other groups breaking up. It would have been better to look at changes in
Facebook's relationship status.

Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article
does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is
even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas
because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas
together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't
going anywhere.

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jhuckestein
The spike on April 1st is because people joke _about_ breaking up.

Other than that, the title is total linkbait.

~~~
c4urself
was just about to say that! obviously cnn didn't bother thinking about this

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iamwil
It would be interesting to be able to segment the graph by how long the
relationship that was just broken up--mostly as a proxy for how long someone
takes to recover from having broken up. Thus, you can find the best times of
the year to be looking for singles.

If everyone took the same amount of time to get over the last relationship
(which is not true), then we can just start looking for singles just a couple
months after the spikes.

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tyrmored
That's a pretty curious and probably flawed metric to choose. Surely it would
be better to find the actual "is no longer in a relationship" updates?

Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually
include those two phrases? I call bullshit.

~~~
achompas
I've been on Twitter for about 20 months and tweeted 1000 times.

Using that ratio (50 updates/month), we can estimate that their 10,000 status
updates cover 16 people over a year.

My first instinct was "why not?" but thinking about this more, that looks kind
of thin. Of course, I'm assuming a lot of things away...

~~~
chronomex
It sounds to me like the 10,000 "status updates" include only status updates
containing the keywords, probably from the Facebook search function.

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stephencelis
Originally posted here: [http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-
about-face...](http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-about-
facebook-and-breakups/)

What are the rules re: reposts of vias?

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achompas
Right, the article examines breakups _ex-post._ That is, they can only
identify breakups after they happen.

 _Ex-ante_ , though...I remember hearing somewhere that Zuckerberg used to
predict when people were about to split, because they could see whose profiles
you were looking at.

If you started checking out potential partners with a high frequency, and you
were in a relationship, Zuck et al. knew it wouldn't last long.

