A Look At Facebook Lexicon

Facebook launched "Lexicon" today, if your logged into Facebook you can find it here. http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/

It trends on forums across Facebook  so you can see the buzz surrounding different 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.