Wolfram Alpha, the geniuses who brought you the sophisticated "knowledge engine" and taught Siri practically everything she knows, have bestowed upon the world a new online activity even more narcissistic than Googling yourself: running analytics on your Facebook account.
Wolfram Alpha's "Facebook report" puts personal analytics within everyone's reach and lets users actually benefit from the big data they've passed over to the social network. Plus, it's a whole lot of fun.
The things I learned from my "Facebook report," which I generated by entering "Facebook report" into the Wolfram Alpha site and giving it access to my Facebook profile, include:
And much, much more. As Stephen Wolfram, who helped pioneer Wolfram Alpha's "knowledge engine," notes, "When you type 'facebook report', Wolfram Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report -- almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc." (Wolfram's blog post introducing the feature includes a subtle dig at the social network: "I have to admit that I’m not a very diligent user of Facebook (mostly because I have too many other things to do). But I’ve got lots of Facebook friends (most of whom, sadly, I don’t know in real life)."
Try the tool for yourself here.