Its amazing what the data analysis of the world’s biggest social networking site throws at us. Facebook just got 1 million messages from their website analyzed and found that- youth swears more, old people talk a lot about other people and less about themselves; popular people like to talk about TV, movies, and other people and they use profane language. Less popular people talk about less interesting things. These revelations are made by the home team of researchers for Facebook. The scope for freelance outside researchers is huge in this topic.
Facebook has undertaken the research work by itself, which is good. It would be better if they also allow outside researchers to have a look at it. Oliver Chiang, at Forbes said: “But really, what Facebook should do… is open up its data for research. Because they don’t, we get highly sanitized findings (like these top trends, or the finding that being active on Facebook leads to increased happiness), and even, reportedly, a black market for Facebook data. The company collects the thoughts, images and content of more than half a billion users – that data could be used for good.”
Also Michael Agger of Slate.com said in an article about the same topic, “It would be helpful for transportation planners to know the places where people complain the most about traffic. Educators could see the data and sentiment analysis around how a community feels about its local schools.”
Bernardo Huberman, did the same thing some years ago when Facebook was not so popular and legally well equipped. He is a social researcher at HP. He said “This data is amazingly important from a commercial point of view. This data is amazingly important from a commercial point of view.”
If this kind of bulk data from such a huge site is taken for researched time and again it will be better to give more space to freelance researchers so that the revelations are more credible and taken seriously.