You and your friends have very similar minds

Ronny Kerr · December 23, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1535

Facebook status update data shows correlations, some more obvious than others

status update

Do you ever wonder why your friends’ status updates get all the Likes while yours are left all alone to wither without any reaction? Are you looking to study up on how to attract more commenters to your updates? Look no further than the latest report from the Facebook Data Team, entitled What’s on your mind?

Taking its name from the open-ended status update question akin to Twitter’s “What’s happening?”, the new report studied correlation between word categories and age, friend count, likes and comments, coming up with some conclusions that might seem obvious and others that aren’t so obvious. For example, young people swear more than older people in their status updates. Wow. Less immediately obvious is a finding that says users with lower friend counts talk about family and are more emotional in their updates.

For these correlations, Facebook used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary, which breaks words down into 68 meaningful word categories, based on cohesive concepts like parts of speech (pronouns, past-tense verbs), emotional content (positive emotions, anger), or topics (school religion).

The correlation graphs are reproduced below.

cor1

Here are a couple sample readings: the graph in the upper left shows that older people tend to type longer statuses (based on “Total Word Count” being at the top); the graph in the bottom right shows that statuses with “Positive Emotions,” listed at the very bottom, tend to attract less comments.

cor2

Facebook also found that word usage easily corresponds to what people are normally doing during that time of day (“work”/”school” posts by day, “sleep” posts late at night)--nothing crazy there. Interestingly, status updates tend to be more positive in the early part of the day and gradually become more negative as the day goes on. Be sure to check out the original post for all the data.

Probably the coolest finding of the study, though far from the most surprising, is that users tend to write status updates that have much in common with the updates of their friends.

friends graph

Lisa Zhang, a data science intern at Facebook, explains the above graph in her full blog post:

“The word 'homophily' literally means 'love of the same.' It is the idea that people tend to associate with others similar to them. Homophily was apparent in one part of our analysis, where we looked at the correlation between how much a user uses certain words in his status updates, and how much similar words are used in his friends’ updates shown on his feeds. The correlation plot below shows a clear diagonal line, meaning there is a positive correlation between how much you use words from a word group, and how much your friends do.”

Never before has any organization had such comprehensive access to the thoughts and feelings of so many human beings--well over 500 million worldwide--and it’s almost scary to consider what they could do with that data. In the beginning of her blog post, Zhang is quick to point out that “no human ever read your updates,” but people should be very aware, if not a little concerned, that Facebook knows so much about the mind, at both the individual and social levels.

Still, at least they're sharing the data with us!

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.