Facebook launched “Lexicon” today, if your logged into Facebook
you can find it here. http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/
words and phrases. “Lexicon pulls from the wealth of data on Facebook without
collecting any personal information in order to respect everyone’s privacy.”
This is a Facebook zeitgeist tool and allows you to trend
several phrases together. Nice inclusion of historical data so you get a nice plot. As far as I can tell you can not export data. Making the PII a non issue by making the data anonymous was a
no-brainier and the following paragraph gives a good look at the basic logic
behind it.
“How are these numbers calculated? We have a cluster of
computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example,
“juno”) across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system
strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to
track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads
these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations,
or any other private user-to-user communications.”
It is really nice to see companies put this data online this
way we would love to see more of it. It is exactly what we are feeling with
Trendrr the fun of identifying and tracking trends and buzz around content not
the individual, expect a lexicon plug-in for trendrr soon.
