personalanalytics
Latest
Wolfram Alpha expands Facebook analytics, takes a closer look at your social relationships
Have you ever wanted to know if you're the most popular amongst your group of friends? Or which of your pals lives the furthest from you? These are questions that can't be answered by Facebook's latest Graph Search, but they're perfect for the stats geeks over at Wolfram Alpha. The group started mining Facebook for data last year, but have recently expanded its analytics to include a closer look at your social relationships. Namely, they've identified five "network roles:" social insiders, outsiders, neighbors, gateways and connectors. Insiders share the same friends while outsiders don't, neighbors don't have a lot of buddies outside of your network while gateways do, and connectors are those that bridge two networks together, like a college buddy who went to the same high school. Combined with location, age and other info, this data unlocks an array of potential visualizations color-coded by different categories, letting you see patterns you might not have noticed before. If you think the analysis ends there, think again; by enabling a "Historical Analytics" feature, you'll be allowing Wolfram Alpha to continually collect your info so you can see how your Facebook profile changes over time. If you're not creeped out by that notion, jump on over to the rightmost source link and fill in the appropriate details to see just how well you know your "friends." Note: It seems that Facebook has limited Wolfram's API calls, so you might get an error when accessing the tool for now.
Google dives into personal analytics with new Account Activity feature
We recently saw Stephen Wolfram reveal what he called the personal analytics of his life (built from decades of meticulous data collection), and it looks like Google is now going some way towards making that easier for you to do yourself. It rolled out its new Account Activity feature today, an opt-in tool (still technically in beta) that tracks your activity across Google's services and delivers a report each month on your internet use. That includes things like the number of emails sent and received, your most contacted email addresses, information about your search history (if you have it enabled), stats from Google Latitude, and the different browsers and devices you've used to sign into Google services. What's more, that's apparently just the beginning -- Google says it plans to incorporate even more services over the next few months.
Stephen Wolfram reveals the personal analytics of his life
Stephen Wolfram may now be best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, but he's been involved with data in one way or another for decades, and it turns out he's been collecting plenty of data about himself all that time. Now, he's taken things one step further and made some of that data public, offering a detailed analysis on his blog of his daily email and phone use, and even things like steps, keystrokes, and the occurrence of years in the 230,000 odd pages of documents he's scanned. What's perhaps most interesting, though, is that Wolfram only sees this as the beginning of personal analytics. He eventually hopes to be able to ask Wolfram Alpha all sorts of things about his life, with it not only able to "act as an adjunct to my personal memory," he says, "but also to be able to do automatic computational history -- explaining how and why things happened -- and then making projections and predictions." Interested in doing the same thing yourself one day? Better start hanging onto all that data.
