Facebook Now Tracking Gross National Happiness; Continues Hoarding Data
Facebook announced this afternoon that it is tracking what it calls its version of Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. It's very interesting to see how people feel about various world events that Facebook has cross referenced - US users are more happy on Thanksgiving than on Christmas, for example.
The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.
Almost a year ago we wrote about how a widely discussed Facebook Sentiment Engine could be a huge asset. That theoretical possibility held at least as much potential as the very real Google data about most popular searches minute-by-minute during the last Presidential debates.
One best-case scenario we imagined looked like this:
Think of the non-commercial, public interest kind of data that could be acquired. When the economic stimulus plan of 2009 was first announced on national television - what was the reaction of people in their mid twenties who lived in the Mid West of the US? Was that collective reaction substantially different from the reaction of self-identified queer people of color living in the North East US? How did the public reaction to the proposed plan change one hour, one day or one week after the announcement? This is all very interesting and potentially valuable data that could be, for the first time in history, available in near real time. Just by listening to what people are talking about in status updates and comments.
Unfortunately, that's not what Facebook has given us. It's almost a year later and all we get is a hands-off graph showing that people were sad when Heath Ledger died and were happy on National Holidays. What a tragic loss of public access to a valuable resource that we ourselves are creating.
If the movement to make social networking a distributed, decentralized phenomenon ends up succeeding and capturing these kinds of benefits of scale - we're going to look back at this point in history and think it's absurd that one company kept so much important knowledge from society at large.
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Interesting data no doubt, and I for one hope that Facebook opens their API. It would make my life easier when making decisions about whether to engage customers there.
Much of the analysis discussed above can be done with social media tools already available without any FB data. It's just a matter of asking the right questions.
Jimmy, I'm not sure you're right abot it being available without FB data. The implicit nature of the conversation, as opposed to an opt-in survey, seems meaningful. Social graph, demographic and other kinds of data seem really juicy on Facebook. And even if I did ask the question, how much more efficient would it be to be able to just pound some data with variations of questions, etc?
Facebook's a black hole that sucks everything, let's nothing out? *GASP!*
/snark
We're still waiting for opened facebook API to access status updates and comments!
Interesting, "National Happiness" model. Perhaps Facebook got this idea from reading the latest Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol?
Page 72. You be the judge.
Get real mate. That sort of information has huge value in today's world. Imagine coca-cola airing new commercial during prime-time (USA superbowl or something). The reaction data that could be collected via facebook means literally millions of dollars for coca-cola. Are people talking about it, do they think it sucked, etc. Any major event could be tracked easily and in a matter of seconds reactions could be dissected. Twitter allows such things but only because they are still small compared to facebook.
Data and datamining is worth gold. Getting that for free - keep dreaming.
What do people expect for a free service that they enter scads of mineable information into?
Yet another reason why Google Wave will be a wonderful thing if it catches on. All of that information will be public and anyone will be able to aggregate it with Google Wave being open source.
If people begin to use Google Wave as there one stop shop for all things social and communication, all emotional sentiment will likely be able to be publicly aggregated just like most other Google data - and not just status updates. All Waves. So basically email, IM, status updates, etc. Kinda scary, kinda wonderful. Undecided on that aspect.
What it is about St. Patrick's Day that makes it such a major U.S. holiday? :)
I thank there would be more Happy New Years & St Pattys Days (drunk on green beer LOL) But Happy & Thanks Giving probably double Thanksgiving rates of happiness.
I wonder exactly what words they deem positive & negative. Maybe people are happier when NOT posting on the internet and being bored LOL
Yep. People saying Happy New Year, Happy Valentine's Day, Happy Whatever Day means that people are actually happy on those days. I wonder if they zero out the happiness weight if someone said Happy Fucking Valentine's Day.
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Facebook needs to stop hoarding all that data and just open up their API. Hopefully they are smart enough to know that they will need to leverage their data before some new game-changing force halts their momentum? It's just a matter of time.