Wolfram Alpha Facebook App Distills Wealth of Your Personal Data

03.09.2012

Want to know which friends comment most on your posts and who shares your posts most often? Wolfram Alpha's Facebook app will tell you, along with interesting stats on which Facebook apps you use on various days and times each week as well as what times of day during the week you're most active on the site. It also gives you pie charts that indicate the percentage of male versus female friends, how many are married, single, in a relationship or engaged, not to mention the ages of your oldest and youngest friends.

In my case, my oldest friend is 111 years old, and I am only 19. Not really, of course. The thing to keep in mind here is that Wolfram Alpha -- and Facebook, for that matter -- only know the information you have freely submitted.

For some people, like me and my 30-something friend who chooses to lie about his age, these companies, which benefit the more they know, are less able to hone in on who we are, what we like and with whom we most often associate if we're more vigilant about what we share online. The less data mining entities know about me, the better.

Wolfram Alpha's new tool is definitely an interesting window into how much you've shared with Facebook, if you care about that sort of thing. But, it can definitely be fooled. Even so, I was surprised at how much information the app garnered from what I've posted on Facebook.

To use Wolfram Alpha's Facebook report, go to , and in the search box input "Facebook report." You'll have to give the app permission to access your Facebook account, as well as set up a Wolfram Alpha account.