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Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook
- sp332 14y agoThis is what I always wanted out of FB.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoNice viral way to data mine personal data here.
- ecmendenhall 14y agoHere's the direct link to try it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.
- togasystems 14y agoCan you name some self-trackers that you use?
- ecmendenhall 14y agoSure. I use CRON-O-Meter (http://cronometer.com/ http://cronometer.com/) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (http://runkeeper.com/home http://runkeeper.com/home) and Fitocracy (https://www.fitocracy.com/ https://www.fitocracy.com/) to track exercise, Moodscope (http://www.moodscope.com/login http://www.moodscope.com/login) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (http://your.flowingdata.com/ http://your.flowingdata.com/) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (http://mycro.media.mit.edu/ http://mycro.media.mit.edu/), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it). Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.
- Evbn 14y agoWhat do you use to track your trackers?
- taliesinb 14y agoI've always thought there was a niche market for a complete, secure, self-hosted self-tracking solution, from keystrokes through to email, file system usage, and HTTP traffic. If anyone knows of anything along these lines, I'd be interested to hear about it, but I suspect it doesn't exist. Probably the difficulty of doing cool things with the resulting data is one of the main reasons such a product doesn't exist.
- jameswyse 14y agoThe screenshots look great but I can't access the feature at all, the page just times out.
- webwanderings 14y agoAh, where did I see the word 'knowledge domain' before? Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
- unreal37 14y agoJust... wow. I love what Wolfram Alpha is doing with data-based search results. So innovative and a natural search space that Google is only dipping their toes into.
- abruzzi 14y agoGoogle is doing all of this, but not publicly. Through Google accounts, Google+ and even just search cookies, Google has most of the same or similar information, but their goal isn't to provide it to you in a data analysis, but to use it for ad targeting.
- drharris 14y agoLooks really cool, but it keeps timing out on me. Been longing for this kind of information, so here's hoping it will work soon!
- arrowgunz 14y agoTimes out on me! :(
- diedsj 14y agosame here :(
- a_bonobo 14y agoIt timed out on me too, then I just hit the "Submit-button" again and all the data appeared
- ebertx 14y agoI'm excited to try it, but I'm a bit disappointed they're having such performance issues right now, regardless of the traffic. I would have expected a better launch from Wolfram Alpha.
- motters 14y agoLike Wolfram, I've been doing some personal analytics for a while, but only with email (http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph). Potentially it would be possible to build a Friendica addon which does similar things to the Facebook Report.
- taliesinb 14y agoThat's pretty cool -- I always suspected people out there had done this kind of thing. Nice work! P.S. You should try out Mathematica sometime, it is a better fit for doing cool things with rich data than C or even Python (disclosure: I work at Wolfram).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- stevencorona 14y agorelated: anyone know any good platforms for collecting personal data so you can make cool graphs like this? i use google spreadsheet right now, but im not a fan.
- carlob 14y agoHave you tried Wolfram|Alpha Pro data input features themselves for the analysis?
- taliesinb 14y agoFunnily enough, many of the visualizations you see in the Facebook scanner have their origin in Wolfram|Alpha Pro scanners (especially the network analysis and visualization stuff), although they've been heavily adapted and tweaked.
- programnature 14y agoThis is the kind of thing they need to get into. Data that lots of people care about, data for the masses, rather than obscure details on bolt sizes or ancient currencies. "Compute things people want". I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product comparisons.
- spitfire 14y agoI am genuinely surprised we have not seen any "big data" articles about celebrity gossip rags. That has to be a market you could data-mine the crap out of for fun and profit. I can imagine split testing Tom Cruise vs George Clooney to see who generates more revenue. You could call it quantitative gossip.
- chime 14y agoI'm pretty sure media companies do that already. They just won't publish it because of competition and PR reasons.
- karono 14y agoMedia companies are actually doing this already, for example to recommend the fitting celebrity for an advertisement ;-) Just take a look at http://www.celebrityperformance.com/ http://www.celebrityperformance.com/
- samstave 14y agoI would be surprised if FB does NOT have an analytics portal similar to this it allows NSA types to access.
- whuff739 14y agoI look forward to trying this, Wolfram's site is a little slow right now though.
- ninetax 14y agoDo you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.
- matthewcford 14y agoHappened to me when Apple launched the iPhone, which I had designed for my pre-GCSE project in 1996. Then again when for my actual GCSE project, I designed a electric car in a Lotus Elise inspired body. That's life though, suffice to say I'm buying a tesla roadster when they're next available and I have the cash.
- magicarp 14y agoI'm sure there are ways you could improve upon this.
- ninetax 14y agoI'm sure. I would like it to be more of an open platform for Facebook data, and focus more on friends. Plus it should be local instead of trusting other with all your data.
- prezjordan 14y agoDisrupt it :) Now you know what features they've got (and more importantly, what features they don't). I personally don't feel 100% comfortable linking with facebook - so a little pre-scan pep talk would be great. Plenty of other metrics to check out, too. Don't give up.
- richardjordan 14y agoTotally agree with this. Competition is good - plus you have the advantage of seeing what they worked on. Remember, first mover advantage might be good in some cases - but in a lot of cases the only thing Pioneers get is arrows in the back.
- zoba 14y agoIt seems concerning that my personal information can be so easily summed up and displayed in easily digestible format. I'm not sure if you can view other people's Wolfram Alpha Facebook summaries, or what data they could be collecting about me... However, here is one study that demonstrates that your sexual orientation can be determined just by analyzing your Facebook friends. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2611/2302 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...
- dskang 14y agoNot only is the analytical part super neat, but this is an absolutely brilliant way to get people to find out about Wolfram Alpha and create an account.
- Shalen 14y agogetting this { "result" : "failure", "action" : "", "url" : "" }
- rm999 14y agoI can't access it now, alpha is very being slow. The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllolmdbdgeggionole https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...
- dskang 14y agoI made something related to that extension, but instead of counting the number of hits, it keeps track of how much time you spend on different websites: http://webtimerapp.com http://webtimerapp.com
- mutual_likes 14y agoI expected this to be very slow. Access to Facebook's API is slow. My Facebook app that analyzes mutual likes is very simple and has just one stat, but it could take a second to query data for every 10 friends. The more friends you have the slower it is. You can't use just one query for all your friends either. You have split queries and wait for each before querying for the next batch.
- ohashi 14y agoI really want to use this service and check out the interesting data it generates. But I don't really want to give away all my data to WolframAlpha. It says 'Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.' but I am not really sure. It's encouraging me to come back and let it continuously mine it? I am conflicted.
- Evbn 14y agoIt pretty clearly says they are deleting your data after one hour.
- amirmc 14y agoThis just made personal search a very interesting space. Put aside for a moment the fact that you're giving your personal data to (yet another) third party. Imagine you tie all your social online stuff to a service that's good at aggregating/displaying the data from each one. Now I could have a 'dashboard' of my online life as well as being able to query it (e.g when/how did I last interact with Alice or Bob?). I don't know how good Alpha actually is but if I take the visualisations on faith, then I'm interested to know where they're headed. If I were a startup in the personal data/aggregation space, I'd be paying very close attention.
- ninetax 14y agoIt's hard to ignore that I've just granted someone most of the permissions available to my facebook, but I totally agree that if I could get an aggregation of all my social data in one place and pipe it into some visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty formidable. I just wish I could have that without having to sacrifice my privacy. Why not have a standalone app like the days of old?
- amirmc 14y ago> "... if I could get an aggregation of all my social data in one place and pipe it into some visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty formidable." You mean something like this? (or at least enabled by it). http://perscon.net/overview/dataware.html http://perscon.net/overview/dataware.html It's one of the research topics I'm involved with. Any feedback/opinions appreciated (I can pass it on to the folks actually working on it).
- melvinmt 14y ago> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website. .. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (which is nice by the way).
- ryguytilidie 14y agoHeh, my experience exactly.
- mikerice 14y agoThis is what I thought. Load times were brutal. But I do love Wolfram Alpha.
- andyjsong 14y agoI can't even sign in, it's just a blank dialog box.
- bane 14y agoI also had to switch from Chrome to Firefox to get it to work (in addition to all of the above).
- davidwparker 14y agoI also had to switch to Firefox (after seeing your post here). I tried with Chrome for hours before seeing this, switching, and it worked right away.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoMine was a three click process, I was already signed in to Facebook. Go to app (Facebook), Allow access, Create account. Done!
- e28eta 14y agoYou forgot "reactivate FB account" as step one. Although I'm considering doing that to check this out - it looks very cool.
- lancewiggs 14y agoLike the author I'm also not really active on Facebook, but I found the clustering of friends particularly insightful. I can see this extending to Twitter, Linked in and so on, combining everything into a dynamic scorecard. This is what Klout should have been. (Personal blog post showing clustering: http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network/ http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network...)
- yread 14y agoThe clustering is so good it's almost scarily good. I wish there was an option for creating friends list automatically from it.
- cmelbye 14y agoWow, the coolest part (in my opinion) is the Friend Network section at the bottom. It accurately mapped and clustered every section of my life, including my first high school, the high school I moved to after that, my college, my family, various work groups and social groups, etc. Very interesting to see visually.
- martinwnet 14y agoAll collected in neat little circles. Maybe Google+ was onto something after all...
- AustinGibbons 14y agoThis was the first time I have ever seen a loading bar go down both percentage and visually. Why on earth would they do that?
- nadahalli 14y agoI am not sure how many have seen http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com by Linkedin Labs. The graph is much more neater, zoomable, and shows quirky insights about your network.
- bane 14y agoNot bad, the friend network clustering was pretty good (clustered using mutual friends). You can clearly see clusters of people from each place I've worked, the neighborhood I live in, my school friends etc. each in almost their own cluster (and when they aren't neatly organized, there's a very good reason why, like people who moved between jobs with me...aggregating both clusters together). Strangely, it gets my place of residence wrong.
- npguy 14y agoVery soon, Facebook needs to get to a point where when you log in it would ask you "what is your target mood: happy, stimulated to do more work, disturbed, relax,happy" and would tailor what you see and do based on past analytics.
- tokenadult 14y agoI really liked the Facebook report from Wolfram Alpha. Logging in was pretty easy for me because I already have a Wolfram log-in. I started the process just before a family meeting and walk with my wife, and less than an hour after I started, I see on screen a DETAILED analysis of my heavy use of Facebook, with a lot of information I've been looking for--for example who is the person who comments the most on my wall, or which post that I ever posted has had the most comments. (Hmm, the link referred to in that post belongs HN if it hasn't been posted before.) On the whole, it is more user-friendly than Facebook itself for telling me about my activity and connections on Facebook, so I'm glad I signed up for the Facebook report on Wolfram Alpha.
- pulak 14y agoThis is interestingly non-viral. Although it's one of the coolest links I've seen in a while, it takes much longer to "consume" this, and sharing doesn't have until after consumption. Interesting to note how much less frequently this was shared than some much interesting "popular links".
- christofd 14y agoYeah, stuff with a scientific bend doesn't get shared, although it has impact. It creates its own niche, with considerably less noise. Sorry to broaden the scope, but this made me think... In stock markets, you have the concept of "noise traders", less well-informed traders. They sort of create their own dynamics, sometimes even generating good return on investments, where better informed traders stay out of the market. Social dynamics... not sure if it's possible to derive some new fundamental laws, because human behavior is too fluid. Maybe in the end (after years of "big data" number crunching) all we get is some empirical observations and weak correlations.
- christofd 14y agoWow. That's impressive. Big step forward in social analytics.
- smackfu 14y agoHave to love those people with ages of 99 years. (At least they deal with the "hide my birth year" people correctly instead of saying they are 1-year-old.)
- sebtoast 14y agoI have a small bug with it: I set my city in my Facebook profile and Wolfram Alpha says I'm in a city with the same name but in France. But the map shows the right city.