Most of us spend hours upon hours on Facebook sharing, liking, finding friends and commenting. We almost have a second life online. Wolfram Alpha believes our activity on Facebook can say something about us. Their new tool, the Wolfram Alpha tool, analyzes your activity on Facebook to give you detailed information about your life online. Have you ever wondered what your Facebook would say about you?
How the Tool Works
The Wolfram Alpha tool receives information from your Facebook (with your permission, of course) about your activity, friends and trends. It analyzes the data to tell you all kinds of interesting information like what you post most, what time of day you're most active, what types of friends you have, even what words you use the most!
The information is formatted into charts to make it easy to understand what your Facebook has to say about you and your friends. There's even a really neat graph that shows your network of friends and how they're all connected.
How to Use Wolfram Alpha Tool
The way the tool works is similar to any other app. You'll visit WolframAlpha.com and type "Facebook Report" in the field, and then choose "Analyze My Facebook Data." You'll be prompted to give the tool permission to access your data, and you'll then set up a free account. Once this is done, you can analyze your data and learn about your online self!
The depth of the information is quite astounding. I was shocked to see it produce the day of my birthday. Not the date, the actual day of the week! It's also interesting to see what days you post the most, the average length of your posts, your most liked photos, etc.
More Wolfram Alpha Info
Wolfram Alpha is most famous for being behind Siri, Apple's voice assistant technology. They also power the Wolfram Alpha computational search engine. Instead of basic information, the search engine provides statistics and calculations. For example, a search of "motorcycle attorney" will yield information about the number of attorneys employed, the yearly change in employment, attorney's fraction of the workforce, etc.
The man behind Wolfram Research, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, is very interested in personal analytics. Dr. Wolfram actually released a report analyzing his own personal habits using factors such as emails, keystrokes, a pedometer and more. He plans to do more detailed research of his own life at a later time.
Wolfram also has plans to further the personal analytics possibilities for the public and looks forward to the future, when he feels everyone will collect and analyze data about themselves. The Wolfram Alpha tool only takes a few minutes to use, and if nothing else, it gives you a good idea of how your time is spent online.
