You're home for the holiday, no school, just friends, family and Facebook. People make millions of status updates per day on Facebook... literally. It got the good people at Facebook wondering what they could learn from tracking people's status updates.
What do people like to talk about online? Does age affect your status updates? How does the time of day affect people's status updates? Do popular people with lots of Facebook friends say different things than unpopular people?
So Facebook did a study... analyzing about a million status updates and found out a few things...
Status: holding a stick
The younger you are... the angrier you are. Younger people tend to make more negative status updates, and they swear more. Younger people also talk about school and themselves... A LOT more than older people. Not surprising.
Older people tend to be more positive, writer longer status updates, post more articles and talk more about OTHER people... like their friends and family.
What about popular people? Well, people with more "friends" on Facebook use the pronoun "you" and other second person pronouns... meaning they're talking to and about other people than themselves. Popular people tend to write longer status updates and talk a lot about sports and music.
What about the time of day? How does that affect our status updates?
Well, people talk about sleep and sleeping late at night and talk about work in the morning. Makes perfect sense. People are talking about what they are or SHOULD be doing.
Our status updates aren't just about us, they are about our friends and family too. There is an art to it. If you are funny people will send you friend requests just so that they can follow your status updates. If you're negative a lot, people will hide you from their feed. Nobody wants to log into Facebook to get bummed out.
Here is a chart of the kind of words that people use in their status updates, ranked by likes/comments - the ones at the top are the ones people like, the ones at the bottom people don't like.
So what do you think of this Facebook status data? Do you post a lot of negative updates? Are you more positive? Do you think the data is accurate?
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