Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about all day after seeing some interesting data revealed by British Journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, so I thought I would braindump and get it all out in a post.
David and his team scraped 10,000 status updates on Facebook for the words ‘break up’ and ‘broken up’ and discovered trends in the days and months in the year that people choose to end their relationships. The data showed that break ups peak before social occasions like Spring break and Christmas (tightwads).
One slight problem with this data, it’s rubbish. The trouble with using keywords in status updates is that unless its dead specific, you’re just going to end up with junk. For example, how many people use the word ‘break up’ in their status before SPRING BLOODY BREAK? And before summer, and before xmas, and before easter. “Can’t wait to break up!” or “Broken up for da summer Wooowwoo” or just simply “Broken up!…lol” etc etc etc.
Anyway lets forget about the data that David scraped for a second because Facebook CAN tell when people break up – but sadly that info is only available to Facebook themselves.
How? Relationship status updates.
Facebook knows when people end their relationship or ‘get complicated’, also when people hook up. Times that by 500 million people and you’ve got a pretty good picture of when the world just is going through break ups and make ups.
I love using data to find out this sort of stuff, that’s probably why I’m so fascinated with Facebook, once you get to critical mass like Facebook has you can literally find out how the world feels, which brings me nicely on to -
Google Flu Trends
This.is.amazing - Google can predict the outbreak of flu epidemics in cities and regions 1-2 weeks earlier than federal centres for disease control and prevention.
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world.
Click here to see if your city is about to get ill or read the Guardian article on the service.
So Facebook knows when people are love sick, Google knows when people are actually sick, how would LinkedIn know if a company is in trouble? Read more…
