Take A Plunge

With a huge 300 million users and 40 million daily status updates, Facebook provides very big amount of data. This data can help researchers find out various things whether it is related to business or social or political issues.

Recently, Facebook tried to measure something very fundamental yet interesting: happiness. Named as Gross National Happiness, this new prototype application tries to figure out if Facebook users in the United States are happy or sad.

The description

“…Grouped together, the status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!”

The data used in this survey was collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook.  The app searches for popular phrases and words associated with happiness and sadness, as described by the engineers in Facebook, in the status messages to find out if a particular status message is happy or sad.

The Results

Happiness is generally low on Mondays, gradually improves through the weekend and again drops as the work-week begins. The peaks in happiness are all found around holidays. Thanksgiving brings in the most happiness. Another interesting point here is that late June showed an abrupt drop in happiness, which may be because of the tragic death of Michael Jackson.