Show HN: Facebook data visualizer

http://jackhanford.com/facebook-data-visualizer

by jack_hanford • 12 years ago

62 19 12 years ago

strict9• 12 years ago

Looks neat, but really wish there were examples of the output (screenshots).

I tend to look for the output when prompted with something like this as well. +1 for some demo output on the landing page.

h1ckb• 12 years ago

Yes, I would like to have seen more too.

jack_hanford2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll add screenshots right now

pimlottc• 12 years ago

What do those graphs show? Label your axes!

rangersanger• 12 years ago

gailees• 12 years ago

I live with Jack and the results are extremely interesting.

People could learn so much about themselves and their relationships just by running some basic sentiment analysis on the conversations they have in Messenger.

patja• 12 years ago

The instructions seem to be missing step zero, "Buy a Mac"

OK, I get that I could probably run it in a Debian VM too I am sure. Just a pet peeve of the assumptions around operating system monoculture.

lfuller• 12 years ago

This seems to be based on Node.js and Bower? Both fully cross platform. At the worst it would be Unix-specific.

pranade• 12 years ago

This is awesome!

shrig94• 12 years ago

I ran this and found some really interesting data to back the context around relationships I have with friends. Really interesting to see male vs female, college vs work vs social, new best friends vs old best friends, etc.

ntaso• 12 years ago

Two potential bugs:

1. it doesn't really work with non-English messages or am I mistaken?

2. I changed my name recently on Facebook and now I'm my own best friend, nice :)

jack_hanford2• 12 years ago

unfortunately I haven't been able to test a data set that isn't english :(

And right, that is kind of a known bug. I discovered earlier today when a friend ran it.

Thank you for the feedback!

SchizoDuckie• 12 years ago

Nice effort. Perhaps you can grab some inspiration from Wolfram Alpha's Facebook Report, which is really comprehensive

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook%20report#_=_

saamm• 12 years ago

This is super neat! For usability reasons, I think it might be good to add some labels. For example, on the two "by Year" graphs, there are two lines, and I have no idea what they mean.

hamilton• 12 years ago

Titles would clarify everything (which is easy to add in the data_graphic calls)

[disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the graphing library used. So neat to see it in action!]

phkahler• 12 years ago

On sentiment analysis. I have a friend who posted a lot of status messages that indicated mood. Often on top of the world, often raging about someone or something. I took the time to put 1 year worth of comments into a spreadsheet and gave them a 1-5 score for what I thought her mood was. I wanted to run an Fourier analysis on this to see if a roughly 28 day signal was apparent, but the data was sparse and I didn't feel like finding a way to do it. Can you do that? Can you do it for other people and not just yourself? That would cause quite a stir. FWIW the person I wanted to analyze is probably bipolar, so her posts were always very extreme and that's what got me thinking. My interest was purely science (and humor) but others might want to use/abuse such information.

synunlimited• 12 years ago

One thing I have noticed with FB Messages is that if you have a lot of messages (about 410k messages over the span of 3-4 years) its really hard / impossible to actually get all the messages back to the beginning. When I try to download my FB data it actually just leaves the conversation blank with 0 messages. (In the past it would dump everything it could get leaving it incomplete). I have also tried getting the messages via the Graph API but have hit the same limits that after x time it would just timeout and not get any messages. Which really sucks because I wanted to do some analysis and archiving of the messages.

tabrischen• 12 years ago

How long does it generally take to load? I have a lot of fb messages so I expect it to take a while, just want to know what's the average wait time.

Show HN: Facebook data visualizer

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