

Show HN: Facebook data visualizer - jack_hanford
http://jackhanford.com/facebook-data-visualizer

======
strict9
Looks neat, but really wish there were examples of the output (screenshots).

~~~
j-hernandez
I tend to look for the output when prompted with something like this as well.
+1 for some demo output on the landing page.

------
phkahler
On sentiment analysis. I have a friend who posted a lot of status messages
that indicated mood. Often on top of the world, often raging about someone or
something. I took the time to put 1 year worth of comments into a spreadsheet
and gave them a 1-5 score for what I thought her mood was. I wanted to run an
Fourier analysis on this to see if a roughly 28 day signal was apparent, but
the data was sparse and I didn't feel like finding a way to do it. Can you do
that? Can you do it for other people and not just yourself? That would cause
quite a stir. FWIW the person I wanted to analyze is probably bipolar, so her
posts were always very extreme and that's what got me thinking. My interest
was purely science (and humor) but others might want to use/abuse such
information.

------
SchizoDuckie
Nice effort. Perhaps you can grab some inspiration from Wolfram Alpha's
Facebook Report, which is really comprehensive

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook%20report#_=_](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook%20report#_=_)

------
synunlimited
One thing I have noticed with FB Messages is that if you have a lot of
messages (about 410k messages over the span of 3-4 years) its really hard /
impossible to actually get all the messages back to the beginning. When I try
to download my FB data it actually just leaves the conversation blank with 0
messages. (In the past it would dump everything it could get leaving it
incomplete). I have also tried getting the messages via the Graph API but have
hit the same limits that after x time it would just timeout and not get any
messages. Which really sucks because I wanted to do some analysis and
archiving of the messages.

------
gailees
I live with Jack and the results are extremely interesting.

People could learn so much about themselves and their relationships just by
running some basic sentiment analysis on the conversations they have in
Messenger.

------
jack_hanford
Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll add screenshots right now

~~~
pimlottc
What do those graphs show? Label your axes!

~~~
rangersanger
+1

------
shrig94
I ran this and found some really interesting data to back the context around
relationships I have with friends. Really interesting to see male vs female,
college vs work vs social, new best friends vs old best friends, etc.

------
saamm
This is super neat! For usability reasons, I think it might be good to add
some labels. For example, on the two "by Year" graphs, there are two lines,
and I have no idea what they mean.

~~~
hamilton
Titles would clarify everything (which is easy to add in the data_graphic
calls)

[disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the graphing library used. So neat to
see it in action!]

------
tabrischen
How long does it generally take to load? I have a lot of fb messages so I
expect it to take a while, just want to know what's the average wait time.

------
ntaso
Two potential bugs:

1\. it doesn't really work with non-English messages or am I mistaken?

2\. I changed my name recently on Facebook and now I'm my own best friend,
nice :)

~~~
jack_hanford
unfortunately I haven't been able to test a data set that isn't english :(

And right, that is kind of a known bug. I discovered earlier today when a
friend ran it.

Thank you for the feedback!

------
pranade
This is awesome!

------
patja
The instructions seem to be missing step zero, "Buy a Mac"

OK, I get that I could probably run it in a Debian VM too I am sure. Just a
pet peeve of the assumptions around operating system monoculture.

~~~
lfuller
This seems to be based on Node.js and Bower? Both fully cross platform. At the
worst it would be Unix-specific.

