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| Frequency of break-ups on Facebook |
I watched a TED talk the other day from David McCandless called "The beauty of data visualizations". It was quite amazing and included lots of different datasets. One of them was about Facebook and breakups. David and his team scanned over 10 000 status-updates and set out to learn more about when people broke up. This is what they learned:
- A big peak right before Spring Break
- Most breakups are announced on Mondays
- People like to start the summer being single
- A big peak right before Christmas
- The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day (thanks God)
I watched it this morning, but I've been following McCandless for a while now. In the video he mentions a saying, "information is the new oil", and compares information to fertile soil. Hmm... maybe it is. In a world where so much information is being produced and recorded, it's actually harder for the average person to their opinions and views. They must be diligent as they sift through the many "experts". As the video shows, information will always be biased to the formatter to some degree. Information's value comes from the way the wielder uses it, I think.
Anyway, despite its potential to be effective propaganda, visualising information is a very interesting concept. Some of McCandless's work is pretty well done.
As for the facebook relationship graph: Of course, this is done on American data, but I think you could find some similarities in Australia. I know I once didn't want to be tied down to another country once during Summer...
This graph doesn't show how often people announce new relationships, though, and I think Spring seems to be the time everyone couples off... Could it be that they then decide to stick or twist in a hurry to be single for summer?
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