Have you ever wanted to know if you're the most popular amongst your group of friends? Or which of your pals lives the furthest from you? These are questions that can't be answered by Facebook's latest Graph Search, but they're perfect for the stats geeks over at Wolfram Alpha. The group started mining Facebook for data last year, but have recently expanded its analytics to include a closer look at your social relationships. Namely, they've identified five "network roles:" social insiders, outsiders, neighbors, gateways and connectors. Insiders share the same friends while outsiders don't, neighbors don't have a lot of buddies outside of your network while gateways do, and connectors are those that bridge two networks together, like a college buddy who went to the same high school. Combined with location, age and other info, this data unlocks an array of potential visualizations color-coded by different categories, letting you see patterns you might not have noticed before. If you think the analysis ends there, think again; by enabling a "Historical Analytics" feature, you'll be allowing Wolfram Alpha to continually collect your info so you can see how your Facebook profile changes over time. If you're not creeped out by that notion, jump on over to the rightmost source link and fill in the appropriate details to see just how well you know your "friends."
Note: It seems that Facebook has limited Wolfram's API calls, so you might get an error when accessing the tool for now.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Wolfram Alpha Blog, Wolfram Alpha