It’s more than you ever wanted to know, but also, everything you ever wanted to know.Stephen Wolfram’s recent analysis of over a million people’s Facebook data from the Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook program, is unbelievably thorough. The analysis covers topics such as how people friend each other, how people change with age, and how Facebook land compares to the real world. Our Facebook behavior has never been scrutinized like this before.
The charts above chronicle what Facebook users talk about as they age, and how interests evolve over time. People tend to talk more about politics and weather as they age. Women talk more about relationships, family and friends, pets and animals, and starting in their twenties, health-related things.Men talk more about technology, sports, and most surprisingly, music, movies, and television. And that’s just a cursory glance; the results are endless.
For anyone with a Facebook account, the article is worth a read in its entirety. While Wolfram says that most of the findings are “depressingly stereotypical,” it’s still amazing to see how a person’s thinking changes throughout their lives. Our favorite finding? Wolfram says it best: “It’s as if all those humans, with all the complexities of their lives, still behave in aggregate a bit like molecules.”
(via Stephen Wolfram|Blog)
