Wolfram|Alpha Launches Facebook Analytics Tool

Wolfram|Alpha unleashed the data coveted by ad agencies worldwide this week with a feature that analyzes Facebook information and uses it to create an analytics report.  A user can discover which photo their friends like the most, as well as what their most commented post of all time is. 

The data in the report that has the most potential is the social graphing and user interface information.

For people who aren't familiar with the organization, Wolfram|Alpha is a website that gained national attention in 2008; it was designed to synthesize data from multiple disciplines and domains and use it to answer questions posed by users. 

After letting it scrape my data, I had more questions than answers. 

Wolfram|Alpha did a great job telling me things I already knew:

Based on my last 300 wall posts, my report showed that I interface with Facebook using the website more often than I do using the mobile application.  When I do log in to Facebook using the app, I use the Android app more often than I use the iPhone app.  It also showed me the distribution of ages among my Facebook friends, which was interesting but rather meh. 

The one thing that I was curious to see was the social graph of my friend network.  The results of the report were visually fascinating.  However, I was challenged by the lack of a key.  My friends were accreted into a structure that resembled a molecule. (See screenshot attached to these words.)  

What the colors meant, I can only surmise. 

Some people who I thought would have been included in my Stanford network cluster were relegated to the sidelines of my graph, disconnected from the rest of my network.  My friends seemed to be connected based upon the time and place we met. 

For example, my friend Arno is in my Stanford network. But he’s out in the corner with my friend Florian.  I met both of them at the Rose and Crown in Palo Alto.  Both of them also went to Stanford, yet they’re out there in the uncharted white space of my social graph. 

The system appears to have arbitrarily assigned a different color to each experience that catalyzed a new group of friends.  I really wish I knew. 

Cheers to the W|A team for breaking through the FB wall to extract all this information in one fell swoop.  But frankly, this answer from Wolfram|Alpha felt more like a beta. 

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