

Facebook data scientists: A series of blog posts on love - peapod91
https://www.facebook.com/data/posts/10152217010993415

======
evan_
> For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing
> positive emotions (like "love", "nice", "happy", etc.) minus the proportion
> of words expressing negative ones (like "hate", "hurt", "bad", etc.).

I've always been suspicious of this type of measurement. It seems like
statuses such as "I LOVE shoveling snow SO MUCH but I will be happy when
winter is over!", where positive language is used to convey negative emotions
through irony and contrast, would completely destroy such ratings. Maybe there
are AIs that understand irony?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I would probably naively think that sarcasm/irony goes both way, and that it's
most likely to cancel out or represent a negligible portion of emotion.

------
RockyMcNuts
Good to know, that before people enter a relationship, they interact, and
afterwards, they express happiness.

I await further research predicting breakups, divorces, and stalker homicides.

~~~
bertil
Well, they can predict the likelihood of some of that: even in the same series
the Atlantic is referring to, they gave some insights:
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/when-
lo...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/when-love-goes-
awry/10152066701893859) (Adrien, the author, is a friend, but I haven't talked
about that with him).

They can, but I’m assuming (like the rest) it's neither very new (unanswered
messages, asymmetric attention) or very positive, or reassuring: I remember a
blog post detailing how older, more male profiles spent time on younger, more
female profile a lot, especially through photos. On Valentine’s day, big
corporation have a duty to smile.

On every other day of the week, the ethics of informing, or acting upon any of
that seems murky at best.

------
blueskin_
Reminds me of this graph:

[http://tofesi.mimuw.edu.pl/~cogito/smarterpoland/facebook/si...](http://tofesi.mimuw.edu.pl/~cogito/smarterpoland/facebook/siec.png)

Arrows show flows between groups, times are average time spent between changes
in that group.

------
tbirdz
Reminds me somewhat of the old okcupid posts on statistics of love,
attraction, dating, etc.

~~~
27182818284
I really enjoyed their posts. I wish there were more of them / current
versions.

[http://blog.okcupid.com/](http://blog.okcupid.com/)

~~~
bertil
From what I understand, their blog was so successful that the team sold their
expertise, and have evolved away from dating data. A shame, really: OkCupid
could update their service -- but a great ressource for impertinent, if not
highly un-PC tone, relevant if not brilliant methodology.

------
micheljansen
This shows as much about the data Facebook has as it does about how poorly
Facebook works as a blogging platform.

------
Fasebook
What's the ticker for Love?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ALUV&search_plus_one=...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ALUV&search_plus_one=form&ei=d5sBU7D4JsmUiQKYRQ)

