Yesterday afternoon Facebook posted that they had updated their Lexicon tool with a few new features. One feature is the sentiment feature which lets you see what the sentiment is for various topics based on wall comments. There is also a pretty slick associations feature which tracks what words various terms are associated with by date.

Currently Facebook is displaying a sample of the new Facebook Lexicon feature with 17 terms. Once it is rolled out completely users will be able to enter arbitrary terms. Right now the primary words are politically associated. One of the interesting charts is of the sentiment toward Sarah Palin since she was announced as the Vice Presidential candidate on August 29th (shown below).

Another feature, “pulse”, shows keywords “that frequently occur in the Profiles of users who mentioned” a given topic. “They are ranked by how many times the keyword occurs and how closely associated the keyword is with the topic.” There is also a maps feature which shows where people are talking about a given topic. Currently the feature is limited to the U.S., Great Britain and Canada.

Go take a look at the new Lexicon service to demo all the new features.