Social Media and Compiling Data

We all know that social media has changed the way much of the world interacts with each other and, as we saw a couple of years ago with the protests in Iran, it can put a human face on countries and events all over the world. It has also changed the way that human behavior can be looked at. While this article from CNN focuses on the when I want to take a quick look at the how.

Worried about when you might get dumped? Facebook knows.

That's according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.

British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart. He showed off the graphic at a TED conference last July in Oxford, England.

In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases "breakup" and "broken up."

Facebook provides the ability to keep track of all of this data and to be able to see trends through times. So not only can we compile data from those who we can physically contact, which will typically lead to one country and possibly just one region of that country but from around the world. Now of course you run into the problem of people lying online or just not posting data but these are difficulties that you have in a typical study anyway and those outliers will tend to be more hidden when you have more data. This is interesting and if people continue to use this idea and developing studies who knows what future trends we might be able to see in the long run.

One last thing, don't be that asshole who breaks up with your significant other on Christmas come on people.