I was browsing around Facebook today when I thought of checking the network pages for my universities. Network pages are interesting because you can see stuff that’s popular in your particular network. While the Network pages seem to be rarely used, I still think they’re interesting to have around. For example, here’s the statistics page for Michigan as of right now:
I found it really difficult to find the network page today. In fact, I had to go to google and query for “facebook networks” to actually find the networks page. This is because Facebook is apparently discontinuing the network pages.
Now is a good time for me to ask, “WTF!?” Social networks are interesting because they have multiple variables. People know each other through networks, especially by regional and work networks. By removing network pages, Facebook is losing a pretty important source of info. I understand they’re not removing actual networks; just their pages. But still, why bother getting rid of something? They aren’t really being used, but I still like to check them now and then to get a quick overview of what’s happening.
Recently, Facebook seems to be closer and closer to jumping that proverbial shark. Not just because of this change, but because of changes to the developer platform as well. It’s gotten to the point where one cannot casually write applications for Facebook because the functions they use will surely become deprecated within months. Can you imagine that happening on a real OS? Combine the “alpha” hijinks of the platform with the fact that no meaningful income is being made on the apps, and you have a formula for slow, rotting death of applications!
Will the next Facebook please stand up?
For my SI 544: Stats class this semester, I worked with two cool dudes, Jim Laing and Sameer Halai. Our project involved using data gathered from a Facebook application to test a hypothesis about the perceived sociability of certain musical instruments.
Continue reading ‘Stats Project: Sociability of Musical Instruments Using Facebook Data’
Facebook just recently released a fun new thingy called Lexicon. It shows you a graph of the occurrences of certain words or phrases over time on all Facebook walls. Since I do quite a lot of research using Facebook, I thought I’d take a look at it.
Facebook has some suggested phrase pairs that you can use such as “party tonight” and “hungover.” And as expected, the phrases are cyclical and you tend to see a spike in “hungover” the day after “party tonight.” But it’s worth noting that you can’t prove causation by just correlation.
What’s a little strange is that there doesn’t seem to be any growth going on in Facebook. Maybe they’ve normalized the data so you can spot trends, but you’d kind of assume that word counts would trend towards going up since Facebook is still supposedly growing. Or is Lexicon telling us something Facebook doesn’t want us to know about their growth?
Anyway, at least one question of the ages has been put to rest. According to Lexicon, shampoo really is better than conditioner. STOP LOOKING AT ME, SWAN!
Bonus Analysis:
It looks like the word “happy” is used more on holidays like New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day. But the word “merry” is kind of exclusively used on Christmas. See that strangely unhappy day near the beginning of March? Since it’s a leap year, Feb 29th was included in this graph. And since less people statistically have birthdays on that leap day, the word “happy” was recorded less. Pretty neat stuff, huh? I’m sure there’s other fun stuff to dig out of Lexicon, if you were really inclined to.
One nice thing about constantly iterating your code is that you get new code out quickly to your users. The bad part is you probably don’t do enough testing and your users get code before it’s ready.
Facebook gives you a choice to mark notifications that you get as spam. This is for when your friends won’t stop sending you notifications that you’ve been bitten by werewolf them. Apparently, you can also mark any notification as spam. Even, say, Facebook’s own wall feature. Facebook’s. Wall. Feature.
You know what would be cool? If Facebook developers weren’t so zealous that they skip sanity checks in order to get their pushes out sooner. Unless Facebook wants users to be able to mark their walls as spam. Which is actually understandable, now that I think of it…
Might as well be called something like, “People you befriended then removed because they were jerks” or “People you know but aren’t friends with” or “Jerks who are friends with many of your friends.”
The algorithm is probably pretty simple. Facebook probably just grabs people who are not your friends but share a large number of friends with you. I imagine they aren’t doing any kind of interesting (mathwise) stuff like weighing friends with low degree higher and friends with high degree lower. That would mean that friends who are friend whores count less toward your “People you might know” score than friends who have very few friends.
And that’s why Facebook needs employees well versed in network analysis and graph exploration!
*HINT HINT*
Also, I’d really like to see a “DO NOT WANT” button for the douchebags who keep on showing up in my list of people I may know. Just because I may know them doesn’t mean I want to be “friends” with them, FB.
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