New Wolfram Alpha Tool Lets Users Conduct Personal Analytics On Facebook Data

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Online answer engine Wolfram Alpha, which answers factual queries by computing answers from structured data, unveiled a new feature on Thursday that allows users to conduct personal analytics using their Facebook data.

“Today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data,” said Wolfram CEO Stephen Wolfram.

“Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains; now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics.”

The new report-generating tool provides a fairly deep look at a person’s Facebook characteristics. For example, the report shows which words a person uses most frequently in their status updates, which people ‘like’ their updates the most, the times in which a person uses the social network most frequently. The report also provides a breakdown of app activity and how person’s friends are connected to one another.

The report, which is free, gathers considerable data about a user’s friends, such as age, gender distribution, marital status and the most common name(s). Users can also generate a customized report focused solely on a particular friend by searching for ‘Facebook friends.’

The company said it plans to add even more features to the report in the future.

“This is just the beginning; over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities,” Wolfram said.

Anyone interested in generating their own personal ‘Facebook report’ can do so by going here.

The service will prompt users to connect to Facebook and create a Wolfram Alpha account. From there, Wolfram will gather the user’s Facebook data and compile the report within a few seconds.