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Data-Mine Your Own Facebook Data With Wolfram Alpha

Posted by timothy on from the regurgitate-it-again-ad-infinitum-ibid dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Ever wanted to mine your own Facebook data? Wolfram Alpha is offering you the chance. Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a 'computational knowledge engine.' In contrast to other search engines such as Google and Bing, which return pages of blue hyperlinks in response to queries, Wolfram Alpha offers up objective data: type in the name of a person, for example, and you might receive their dates of birth and death, a timeline, and a graph of Wikipedia page hits. Now Wolfram Alpha's offering a new feature that can spit back years of your personal Facebook data sliced, diced, visualized and analyzed."

55 comments

  1. Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Not sure why that is. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

    1. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by platypussrex · · Score: 0

      Didn't work. Had me log in to FB, give it permissions, then it kept begging me to create a WA account. I call BS on it.

    2. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's been running really slow since yesterday. Each step. If you do it in another tab and just let it run, it'll work.

      The analysis is really interesting, too.

    3. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by platypussrex · · Score: 1

      except that I don't want WA to know my FB login and pswd. That's what it kept asking for, even after I logged in to my (mostly bogus) FB account and gave it permissions. Smells fishy to me.

    4. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by beachcoder · · Score: 2
      As it says in the blog post:

      If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll be prompted to authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha (yes, it’s free).

    5. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup, broke.

    6. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't work for antisocial serial killers either. You know, those without FB account.

    7. Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me by Macgrrl · · Score: 1

      Gosh darn it, and I so wanted to know what the proximity of my college cluster was to my work cluster (what does that mean anyway?)

      --
      Sara
      Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
  2. Hear that? by virb67 · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's the sound of thousands of Facebook users viewing the sum of their lives and realizing it's dull as shit.

    1. Re:Hear that? by moozey · · Score: 0

      Haha! Of course! Because there's absolutely no way in hell that a single person on Facebook is a smart, interesting person who lives a successful and happy life! No fucking way!

    2. Re:Hear that? by lessthan · · Score: 2

      I am dull as shit and I went and tried it. It is pretty cool. The mutual friend clusters are pretty nifty.

      --
      Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
    3. Re:Hear that? by tooyoung · · Score: 1

      Yes, as opposed to vIrb67's life of adventurous escapades.

    4. Re:Hear that? by icebraining · · Score: 1

      Nothing you said contradicts GP, but carry on.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    5. Re:Hear that? by Whiteox · · Score: 1

      HEY! Speak for yourself! ... oh wait....

      --
      Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
  3. Tutorial? by skine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I posted my facebook url, and it told me about facebook.

    I posted my name (my facebook page is facebook.com/firstname.lastname), it gave me nothing.

    I posted "skine." It gave me the definition of skin, with no chance of changing that.

    1. Re:Tutorial? by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      Search for "Facebook report" - you may need to have a (free) account, you also may need to link it to facebook.

      But it does tell you all kinds of neat information.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    2. Re:Tutorial? by asdbffg · · Score: 5, Informative

      How-to here.

    3. Re:Tutorial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's in the article. RTFA

    4. Re:Tutorial? by similar_name · · Score: 1
      Try this link

      type “Facebook report” into the search bar, click “Allow” on the subsequent permissions

    5. Re:Tutorial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately you need to authorise a specific plugin / app for WA so you can't use this for some high end facebook stalking.
      I am disapointed and have promptly re-zipped my pants! :/

  4. Wants my email? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *enters common name*

    "Development of this topic is under investigation...
    Leave your email address to show your interest."

    Lame.

  5. Bad for searching porn ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=anal

    "Anal is an Indian language"

  6. sadly I have no facebook account to analyze by cats-paw · · Score: 1, Interesting

    am I missing out ?

    --
    Absolute statements are never true
    1. Re:sadly I have no facebook account to analyze by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who are you going to trust, if you can't trust a corporation that makes all it's money by monitoring you and selling that data to anyone willing to pay? The government, who also monitors the "social web", and punish anyone they think suspicious? Or, if you, a Democrat, believes Obama could do nothing wrong, what of the next President? And the next one? Differently from people, data never disappears.
      Oh, and Facebook is a waste of time. Some people may love to feed their imaginary cows all day long, but others don't see any benefit from using it.

  7. Whole new can of worm by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Just imagine if your fb account was hacked and your password was compromised

    With the help of Wolfram, now the hacker can get to datamine your data, get things about you that you do not even know ever existed

    Ouch !!
     

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Whole new can of worm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Hacker doesn't care that your college cluster graphs closer to your work cluster than your HS cluster. WA doesn't find anything secret. But yeah keep talking out your ass.

    2. Re:Whole new can of worm by TheLink · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think it's just going through your entire timeline. If you've deleted a lot of it it won't get as much. Anyone can confirm it?

      Does wolfram store the info or does their access to your account info persist? If they do just imagine if hackers hack wolfram and get all the info.

      Why are people here so willing to let yet another party datamine their FB data for FREE? Yes FB has all the data, but at least they'll charge others for it, and I doubt they'd share it all with Google or Microsoft or Yahoo.

      --
    3. Re:Whole new can of worm by hvm2hvm · · Score: 3, Informative

      They said they keep the data for only 1hour for caching purposes and I would think they can't access stuff you deleted. Still, I don't see the problem with WA having your data... Facebook already has it, including the one you deleted so why the hell does it matter any more? It's the same old story - if you don't want your data to be stolen don't post it on the internet, especially on sites that sell it to others...

      --
      ics
    4. Re:Whole new can of worm by vladmihaisima · · Score: 1

      "Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data." (according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/). Considering all the ways your data can "get out" this does not seem that bad...

    5. Re:Whole new can of worm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you directed your privacy concerns at the wrong entity. Wolfram Alpha is not an advertising or marketing company. Nor are they affiliated with any. They just want to make their computational algorithms smarter and like throwing different data sets at it. So throwing your Facebook data at it is nothing more than an interesting experiment to them. They truly don't care about your data.

      I think you should be more worried about the data that Facebook has and why you've given it to them rather than being overly paranoid about what Wolfram Alpha can tell you about it.

      And to answer your question, your data is stored for one hour and then deleted. This is their claim,and their is no way to verify it. I personally trust Wolfram more than any other "app" on the marketplace precisely because their business doesn't mesh with taking my info and trying to sell me stuff.

  8. so how the fuck do you do it? by ClioCJS · · Score: 1

    especially if your data isn't world-public, so a random search engine can't crawl it?

    --
    -Clio
    Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
    Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
  9. Data Mining by mizkitty · · Score: 1

    FTA: "authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha" Wolfram can't "mine" your FB account until you give it access...pretty simple...

  10. Not enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And why exactly aren't we allowed to data mine all Facebook accounts instead of just our own?

    Facebook is allowed to abuse all that private information which they don't own. So why not us too?

    1. Re:Not enough by HJED · · Score: 1

      You can mine all of your Facebook friends public data as well, (click on there name in one of the results from your onw profile).

      --
      null
  11. Not sure this works.. by CrAlt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I enter my face book..

    http://www.facebook.com/cr.alt.7

    One post since 2009...

    And it says I have 11billion page views?

    Huh?

    --
    I have to return some videotapes...
    1. Re:Not sure this works.. by phaedryx · · Score: 1

      Those are statistics for Facebook, not your page.

    2. Re:Not sure this works.. by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 3, Informative

      It says right in the title of the table "Web statistics for all of facebook.com:"

    3. Re:Not sure this works.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Someone's got a secret admirer!

  12. HUGE Security Resource+ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    HUGE Security Resource+ - version 6000 - 08/31/2012
    http://cryptome.org/2012/08/huge-sec-v6000.txt
    http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=f3Z4fQvK
    http://pastebin.com/f3Z4fQvK

    the document Slashdot refuses to post, even deletes it from submission queue.

  13. Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is how you sneak in your paid-for "BI" crap?

    Do the honorable thing and shut the fucking thing DOWN.

  14. Clever... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Data mining company gets users to let them in to another data mining company. Brilliant.

  15. Stop Being an Enabler for Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I wish companies would stop building tools and businesses around Facebook. It just makes the monster that much harder to kill. More and more it's evident that a new competitor needs to come along and wipe out Facebook. Hopefully it would be open source, but for now I'd even settle for another company not quite as evil (yet).

    I also wonder why people continually build data analysis around Facebook and Twitter. In truth, there's very little valuable data and too much noise that's hard to eliminate. Mainly you have free text to work with, and some idiotic data fields that don't tell me much such as likes and interests. All the truth is mixed in with lots of noise. So the best you can do is maybe visualize some things here based on either that or free text posts, but do you really care about the output? What does it tell you about yourself or someone else? Maybe for a two second cool factor, but without teaching a stats class in this post, I'll keep it simple - garbage in, garbage out.

    1. Re:Stop Being an Enabler for Facebook by ANonyMouser · · Score: 0

      You could try DIASPORA.

      --
      I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
    2. Re:Stop Being an Enabler for Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know of Diaspora and BuddyCloud, but really neither can be taken seriously for now. Diaspora is a mess and has been described as such in recent slashdot articles.

      I think someone needs to build something slightly different. If it is based around "walls" and such, it should at least offer some key things Facebook does not or better. Simply being "distributed" is not enough. While an attractive feature, a lot of people who aren't geeks don't care. And these are the people, i.e. the majority, that you need to win over to kill Facebook.

    3. Re:Stop Being an Enabler for Facebook by ANonyMouser · · Score: 0

      Some good points.

      I suspect that anything open source is going to start as indie, small, and messy, and from there might grow in to a viable open source alternative.

      I think that it would not necessarily be better for something to kill facebook because it would then replace it, and most likely be just as 'bad.' It would be better perhaps to have viable alternative, the competition between them would then force each to maximise the quality of what they offer.

      I guess in principle that is what g+ could be considered to be, what ever you think of google. I've managed to avoid g+ so I can't comment.

      --
      I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
  16. Will try this by J3rrYcid · · Score: 1

    I will try this.

    --
    Best Regards, Thomas
  17. IT'S A TRAP!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By playing with this feature, Wolfram Alpha gets a copy of *all* of your Facebook data (not just the "public" parts), which it will undoubtedly retain forever!

    Thanks for playing, suckers!

    Soooo stupid...

    1. Re:IT'S A TRAP!!! by icebraining · · Score: 1

      They've already given it to Facebook, Inc, what makes you think they care about WA?

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    2. Re:IT'S A TRAP!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suppose companies do lie, but it's stated that the info is kept for 1 hours for caching purposes only.

  18. Tutorial for those who asked by wbr1 · · Score: 1

    Since reading the TFA has never been in style here at slashdot, here are instructions.
    1. Go to wolfram alpha.
    2. In the search box type 'Facebook report'
    3. Click the big facebook button and allow access.
    4. ??????
    5. Profit!

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  19. Really fascinating! by Georules · · Score: 1

    I just used wolfram alpha to data mine my facebook data! I found absolutely nothing of value! AMAZING!