Facebook knows when you'll break up
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#2Seems flawed. If all that McCandless did was scrape status updates for "break up" and "broken up", he may well have included events referring to bands or other groups breaking up. It would have been better to look at changes in Facebook's relationship status.
Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't going anywhere.
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#3Originally posted here: http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-about-face...
What are the rules re: reposts of vias?
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#4CNN's crappy rip of the image cuts off everything past October losing some of the most important data (the lead up to the holidays and Christmas Day). They also cut off the months at the bottom so there's no way to accurately tell what is happening in what month.
Here is their source site which has a better version: http://www.geekosystem.com/facebook-breakup-graph/
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#5All this shows is when people are statistically most likely to break up. This cannot be used to predict a specific situation (ie, "when you'll break up"), only to generalize about broad data.
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#6The spike on April 1st is because people joke about breaking up.
Other than that, the title is total linkbait.
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#7I agree that it would be more interesting to predict.
Has anyone taken Facebook data and seen if they could predict suicide or crime? Do people exhibit certain patterns before committing suicide or commiting some big crime spree?
It would also be interesting to see if it could determine if someone is cheating. Of course its harder to get data on when the cheating began to do a good analysis.
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#8The spike on April 1st is because people joke about breaking up. Other than that, the title is total linkbait.
was just about to say that! obviously cnn didn't bother thinking about this
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#9That's a pretty curious and probably flawed metric to choose. Surely it would be better to find the actual "is no longer in a relationship" updates?
Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually include those two phrases? I call bullshit.
Re: Facebook knows when you'll break up
#10Right, the article examines breakups ex-post. That is, they can only identify breakups after they happen.
Ex-ante, though...I remember hearing somewhere that Zuckerberg used to predict when people were about to split, because they could see whose profiles you were looking at.
If you started checking out potential partners with a high frequency, and you were in a relationship, Zuck et al. knew it wouldn't last long.