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Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#41

Post by richardjordan »

ninetax wrote: post #36
richardjordan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how you feel. We have something like this in an upcoming product we're launching. But that's fine. It's okay for people to compete with you. However if you want to chat with someone else working on similar stuff pre-launch, always love to talk to people working on stuff we're working on - tends to make us all better.

Yeah, even though they are your "competition" they have to most in common with you in terms of interests.

...also people often complement by going after slightly different things which creates an ecosystem all benefit from. Ours is a platform play with this as a simple use case to onboard people, so this isn't the core focus. We'll probably still do it, as implementation is partly done already, but it's good to see others doing similar.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#43

Post by karono »

spitfire wrote: post #16
programnature wrote: post #13

This is the kind of thing they need to get into. Data that lots of people care about, data for the masses, rather than obscure details on bolt sizes or ancient currencies. "Compute things people want". I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product comparisons.

I am genuinely surprised we have not seen any "big data" articles about celebrity gossip rags. That has to be a market you could data-mine the crap out of for fun and profit. I can imagine split testing Tom Cruise vs George Clooney to see who generates more revenue. You could call it quantitative gossip.

Media companies are actually doing this already, for example to recommend the fitting celebrity for an advertisement ;-)

Just take a look at http://www.celebrityperformance.com/

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#44

Post by namuorg »

rm999 wrote: post #30

I can't access it now, alpha is very being slow. The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...

I made something related to that extension, but instead of counting the number of hits, it keeps track of how much time you spend on different websites: http://webtimerapp.com

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#45

Post by ohashi »

ninetax wrote: post #17

Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.

Had this happen with my Master's thesis. Not fun. The positive side is, it was a good idea (at least based on the attention it's getting). It gave me something to compare to as well.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#46

Post by ecmendenhall »

togasystems wrote: post #19
ecmendenhall wrote: post #4

Here's the direct link to try it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.

Can you name some self-trackers that you use?

Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (http://cronometer.com/) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (http://runkeeper.com/home) and Fitocracy (https://www.fitocracy.com/) to track exercise, Moodscope (http://www.moodscope.com/login) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (http://your.flowingdata.com/) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (http://mycro.media.mit.edu/), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).

Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#47

Post by ninetax »

ohashi wrote: post #45
ninetax wrote: post #17

Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.

Had this happen with my Master's thesis. Not fun. The positive side is, it was a good idea (at least based on the attention it's getting). It gave me something to compare to as well.

Yeah, it's good to know that you are at least keeping up with the exciting ideas. Better than being completely surprised by it. It's also nice to get some perspective on how other people think about the topic.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#48

Post by ohashi »

I really want to use this service and check out the interesting data it generates. But I don't really want to give away all my data to WolframAlpha. It says 'Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.' but I am not really sure. It's encouraging me to come back and let it continuously mine it? I am conflicted.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#49

Post by mutual_likes »

rm999 wrote: post #30

I can't access it now, alpha is very being slow. The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...

I expected this to be very slow. Access to Facebook's API is slow. My Facebook app that analyzes mutual likes is very simple and has just one stat, but it could take a second to query data for every 10 friends. The more friends you have the slower it is. You can't use just one query for all your friends either. You have split queries and wait for each before querying for the next batch.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

#50

Post by ninetax »

Skywing wrote: post #39
ninetax wrote: post #17

Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.

This happened to me when Yobongo was announced. I had been working on basically the exact same concept for several months. Mine was named GeoHello. I was building mine as a web app, meant to be used by mobile devices. I felt that a native app would be better, but I didn't have any iOS experience at that point in time, so I went with web. I had the demo finished and even began trying to get people to try it out. In ge…

Yeah, I bet that's a difficult problem. It would be pretty cool to see how WA implemented this, unfortunately they don't say. I did get a good perspective of how useful this kinda of service is and how much people are interested in it, whereas before I doubted it would be useful beyond my own curiosity.
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