Nerval’s Lobster writes “Back in January, when Wolfram Alpha launched an updated version of its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, the self-billed ‘computational knowledge engine’ asked users to contribute their detailed Facebook data for research purposes. The researchers at Wolfram Alpha, having crunched all that information, are now offering some data on how users interact with Facebook. For starters, the median number of ‘friends’ is 342, with the average number of friends peaking for those in their late teens before declining at a steady rate. Younger people also have a tendency to largely add Facebook friends around their own age — for example, someone who’s 20 might have lots of friends in the twenty-something range, and comparatively few in other decades of life—while middle-aged people tend to have friends across the age spectrum. Beyond that, the Wolfram Alpha blog offers up some interesting information about friend counts (and ‘friend of friend’ counts), how friends’ networks tend to ‘cluster’ around life events such as school and sports teams, and even how peoples’ postings tend to evolve as they get older — as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics. ‘It feels like we’re starting to be able to train a serious “computational telescope” on the “social universe,”‘ the blog concluded. ‘And it’s letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep Into Facebook Data