
Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook - ecmendenhall
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal-analytics-for-facebook/
======
melvinmt
> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha
> website.

.. 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).

~~~
bane
I also had to switch from Chrome to Firefox to get it to work (in addition to
all of the above).

~~~
davidwparker
I also had to switch to Firefox (after seeing your post here). I tried with
Chrome for hours before seeing this, switching, and it worked right away.

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ninetax
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?

Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick
feeling in my stomach.

Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.

~~~
taliesinb
Yup, it sucks. That happened to me with Light Table, though I had only been
developing very rough prototypes rather than any kind of polished demo.

On the positive side, there is a sense in which it is still overall a good
thing. You might have had your thunder stolen, but at least more people are
now looking up at the sky, and you've had the opportunity to think deeply
about where the winds are blowing.

~~~
Evbn
Write an Eclipse or Vim plugin instead, and have a greater impact.

~~~
taliesinb
I'd like to, but I suspect this kind of thing: <http://imgur.com/ZIVd4> is
best done in an HTML-based IDE like Light Table where you can take advantage
of SVG.

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ecmendenhall
Here's the direct link to try it out:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report>

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.

~~~
togasystems
Can you name some self-trackers that you use?

~~~
ecmendenhall
Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (<http://cronometer.com/>) to track my diet and
weight, RunKeeper (<http://runkeeper.com/home>) and Fitocracy
(<https://www.fitocracy.com/>) to track exercise, Moodscope
(<http://www.moodscope.com/login>) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData
(<http://your.flowingdata.com/>) to track anything else I want to measure. My
favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm
(<http://mycro.media.mit.edu/>), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python
script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).

Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv
or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy
imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool
works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in
one machine-readable place.

~~~
Evbn
What do you use to track your trackers?

------
drharris
Looks really cool, but it keeps timing out on me. Been longing for this kind
of information, so here's hoping it will work soon!

------
programnature
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".

I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product
comparisons.

~~~
spitfire
I am genuinely surprised we have not seen any "big data" articles about
celebrity gossip rags. That _has_ to be a market you could data-mine the crap
out of for fun and profit.

I can imagine split testing Tom Cruise vs George Clooney to see who generates
more revenue.

You could call it quantitative gossip.

~~~
chime
I'm pretty sure media companies do that already. They just won't publish it
because of competition and PR reasons.

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hcarvalhoalves
Nice viral way to data mine personal data here.

~~~
Evbn
That's against FB developer terms of servoce, so would never happen.

~~~
tjoff
Do you think FB would care about that if it were the other way around?

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webwanderings
Ah, where did I see the word 'knowledge domain' before? Here:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-
secur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-
agencys-domestic-spying-program.html)

------
rm999
I can't access it now, alpha is very being slow.

The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllolmdbdgeggionole)

~~~
mutual_likes
I expected this to be very slow. Access to Facebook's API is slow. My Facebook
app that analyzes mutual likes is very simple and has just one stat, but it
could take a second to query data for every 10 friends. The more friends you
have the slower it is. You can't use just one query for all your friends
either. You have split queries and wait for each before querying for the next
batch.

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lancewiggs
Like the author I'm also not really active on Facebook, but I found the
clustering of friends particularly insightful.

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.

(Personal blog post showing clustering:
[http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-
network...](http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network/))

~~~
yread
The clustering is so good it's almost scarily good. I wish there was an option
for creating friends list automatically from it.

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motters
Like Wolfram, I've been doing some personal analytics for a while, but only
with email (<http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph>). Potentially it
would be possible to build a Friendica addon which does similar things to the
Facebook Report.

~~~
taliesinb
That's pretty cool -- I always suspected people out there had done this kind
of thing. Nice work!

P.S. You should try out Mathematica sometime, it is a better fit for doing
cool things with rich data than C or even Python (disclosure: I work at
Wolfram).

------
unreal37
Just... wow.

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.

~~~
abruzzi
Google is doing all of this, but not publicly. Through Google accounts,
Google+ and even just search cookies, Google has most of the same or similar
information, but their goal isn't to provide it to you in a data analysis, but
to use it for ad targeting.

------
zoba
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.

[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2611/2302)

------
cmelbye
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.

~~~
martinwnet
All collected in neat little circles.

Maybe Google+ was onto something after all...

------
pulak
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".

~~~
christofd
Yeah, stuff with a scientific bend doesn't get shared, although it has impact.
It creates its own niche, with considerably less noise.

Sorry to broaden the scope, but this made me think...

In stock markets, you have the concept of "noise traders", less well-informed
traders. They sort of create their own dynamics, sometimes even generating
good return on investments, where better informed traders stay out of the
market.

Social dynamics... not sure if it's possible to derive some new fundamental
laws, because human behavior is too fluid. Maybe in the end (after years of
"big data" number crunching) all we get is some empirical observations and
weak correlations.

------
tokenadult
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.)

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.

------
npguy
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.

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amirmc
This just made personal search a very interesting space.

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?).

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.

~~~
ninetax
It's hard to ignore that I've just granted someone most of the permissions
available to my facebook, but I totally agree that if I could get an
aggregation of all my social data in one place and pipe it into some
visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty formidable.

I just wish I could have that without having to sacrifice my privacy. Why not
have a standalone app like the days of old?

~~~
amirmc
> _"... if I could get an aggregation of all my social data in one place and
> pipe it into some visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty
> formidable."_

You mean something like this? (or at least enabled by it).
<http://perscon.net/overview/dataware.html>

It's one of the research topics I'm involved with. Any feedback/opinions
appreciated (I can pass it on to the folks actually working on it).

------
sp332
_This_ is what I always wanted out of FB.

------
whuff739
I look forward to trying this, Wolfram's site is a little slow right now
though.

------
bane
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).

Strangely, it gets my place of residence wrong.

------
ohashi
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.

~~~
Evbn
It pretty clearly says they are deleting your data after one hour.

------
nadahalli
I am not sure how many have seen <http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com> by Linkedin
Labs. The graph is much more neater, zoomable, and shows quirky insights about
your network.

------
sebtoast
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.

------
dskang
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.

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arrowgunz
Times out on me! :(

~~~
diedsj
same here :(

~~~
a_bonobo
It timed out on me too, then I just hit the "Submit-button" again and all the
data appeared

------
smackfu
Have to love those people with ages of 99 years.

(At least they deal with the "hide my birth year" people correctly instead of
saying they are 1-year-old.)

------
AustinGibbons
This was the first time I have ever seen a loading bar go down both percentage
and visually. Why on earth would they do that?

------
jameswyse
The screenshots look great but I can't access the feature at all, the page
just times out.

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christofd
Wow. That's impressive. Big step forward in social analytics.

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stevencorona
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.

~~~
carlob
Have you tried Wolfram|Alpha Pro data input features themselves for the
analysis?

~~~
taliesinb
Funnily enough, many of the visualizations you see in the Facebook scanner
have their origin in Wolfram|Alpha Pro scanners (especially the network
analysis and visualization stuff), although they've been heavily adapted and
tweaked.

------
Shalen
getting this { "result" : "failure", "action" : "", "url" : "" }

