Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

10 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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
  2. 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 asdbffg · · Score: 5, Informative

      How-to here.

  3. 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 ThatsMyNick · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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

      Someone's got a secret admirer!

  4. 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.

    --
  5. 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).

  6. 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