Facebook has been working on a number of side projects over the past couple years which involve measuring the sentiment of users on the site. The company’s latest project, first announced yesterday afternoon, is the United States Gross National Happiness index. The newly launched tool polls users’ status updates within the United States and then measures their sentiment to determine the collective happiness. While I’m still a little bit cynical of sentiment analysis, there are some definite correlations between holidays and positive updates on Facebook.
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Yesterday evening Facebook released a set of swine flu charts and maps that tracks the conversations surrounding swine flu. While it’s an interesting map it doesn’t really explain much. While there were some initial correlations between the level of conversation and the location of swine flu occurrences, comparing the lexicon maps to Google’s H1N1 Swine Flu map illustrates very little correlation between the two.
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Yesterday afternoon I noticed that a friend of mine, Adam Conner, had posted a link to the Facebook Lexicon which was searching for the term “laid off”. The results are impressive in that it shows a steep increase in the occurrence of the phrase starting in September and continuing to peak now. While these are some depressing statistics, it illustrates how Facebook can be used to produce valuable research.
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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.