Data-Mine Your Own Facebook Data With Wolfram Alpha

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."

Comments

Seems to get hung up at 96% for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me

[platypussrex]

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.

Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me

[beachcoder]

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).

Re:Seems to get hung up at 96% for me

[Macgrrl]

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?)

Hear that?

[virb67]

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

Re:Hear that?

[lessthan]

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

Re:Hear that?

[tooyoung]

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

Re:Hear that?

[icebraining]

Nothing you said contradicts GP, but carry on.

Re:Hear that?

[Whiteox]

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

Tutorial?

[skine]

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.

Re:Tutorial?

[X0563511]

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.

Re:Tutorial?

[asdbffg]

How-to here.

Re:Tutorial?

[similar_name]

Try this link

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

Re:Tutorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

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! :/

Bad for searching porn !

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"Anal is an Indian language"

sadly I have no facebook account to analyze

[cats-paw]

am I missing out ?

Whole new can of worm

[Taco Cowboy]

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 !!
 

Re:Whole new can of worm

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Whole new can of worm

[hvm2hvm]

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...

Re:Whole new can of worm

[vladmihaisima]

"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...

so how the fuck do you do it?

[ClioCJS]

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

Data Mining

[mizkitty]

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...

Not sure this works..

[CrAlt]

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?

Re:Not sure this works..

[phaedryx]

Those are statistics for Facebook, not your page.

Re:Not sure this works..

[ThatsMyNick]

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

Re:Not sure this works..

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's got a secret admirer!

Re:Not enough

[HJED]

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).

Clever...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Stop Being an Enabler for Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Will try this

[J3rrYcid]

I will try this.

Re:IT'S A TRAP!!!

[icebraining]

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

Tutorial for those who asked

[wbr1]

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!

Really fascinating!

[Georules]

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