Skip to footer

What Facebook and Wolfram Alpha can tell you about yourself

Wolfram Alpha reveals Facebook habits, friends.

|
Wolfram Alpha
The author's 'friend cloud.'

Wolfram Alpha may look like Google, but don't be fooled. One is a search engine. The other is something much more strange and powerful.

Google takes your search query and then points you toward websites that probably have the right answer. Wolfram Alpha takes your query and then rolls up its sleeves and tries to answer the question by itself. The website can solve trigonometric functions, list every airplane in the sky above your location, pair complementary colors, lay out music theory, and calculate that there have been four times more episodes of "The Simpsons" than of "Law & Order."

Wolfram Alpha is a warren of powerful tools and fun time-wasters. As the three-year-old website continues its quest to quantify the world, it recently tapped a rich new vein of data: your social life.

Wolfram Alpha can now mine Facebook activity, delivering insights on you, your habits, and your friends.

With your permission, Wolfram Alpha digs into your past. The website finds out which of your Facebook messages drew the most comments, and even which words you use most often. It charts when you play with Facebook applications, possibly revealing patterns you never knew you had.

The results can be fascinating, nostalgia inducing, and sometimes a little creepy.

One of the coolest features is Wolfram Alpha's "friend cloud." It takes all of your Facebook friends and maps out the connections between them. The tool groups mutual friends, guesses how people know each other, and lays out everything like a TV detective's bulletin board of suspects.

For example, in my friend cloud (see chart, above), each dot represents a person. Wolfram Alpha figured out which of my friends I met in college (the red cluster), which are from work (tan), and which share the most friends in common (the larger dots).

You can dig into your own profile by heading to WolframAlpha.com and searching for "Analyze my Facebook data."

Before the site can start number crunching, you will need to give it permission to access your Facebook profile. The tool can also pull up information on your friends – how much information depends on them. Wolfram Alpha can only see what your friends have opted to make public in their Facebook privacy settings.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to What Facebook and Wolfram Alpha can tell you about yourself
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech/2012/1122/What-Facebook-and-Wolfram-Alpha-can-tell-you-about-yourself
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe