Facebook status updates: an informal study
I’d like to believe that Facebook status updates are a reasonably successful piece of social software. I like hearing what my friends are thinking, and I’m willing to (via Twitter) pass my thoughts on to them. But for as many friends that update regularly I seem to find folks on Facebook whose status is from 2007. Do Facebook status updates follow that same 80/20 rule of social software? Or have they succeeded in breaking that barrier and drawing in folks who wouldn’t otherwise participate?
To look into this, I mined my own friends’ status updates for a period of two weeks using an RSS feed that Facebook makes available, from November 17th to November 30th. I then ran some very basic histogram statistics over the data. I’m sure Facebook has much better data than this, but they sure aren’t sharing it.
How many status updates?
OK, it’s a power law. Not surprising. Fully half of my friends didn’t update their status at all within the two-week period. About a quarter did it between 1 and 5 times during the period, and about 8.5% updated between 6 and 10 times. I would call anyone who updates daily or every couple days pretty active. I have a couple friends who updated over 50 times, though they must be aware their friends won’t see all of them. (They may be importing status from other services like Twitter, where people are more likely to see repeated updates.)
Do the number of status updates change over the time period?
I’m surprised how consistent the numbers are day-to-day. In my last Facebook application I found user engagement typically fell over the weekends; here it seems relatively constant. Of course, these numbers could be overrun by a few individuals who update a lot, but the trends are still pretty strong. Seems like there were some drops the couple days after Thanksgiving.
11/17: 125 updates
11/18: 116 updates
11/19: 112 updates
11/20: 121 updates
11/21: 121 updates
11/22: 117 updates
11/23: 95 updates
11/24: 139 updates
11/25: 110 updates
11/26: 128 updates
11/27: 110 updates
11/28: 98 updates
11/29: 93 updates
11/30: 123 updates
If you’d like to replicate this for yourself, I’d be happy to share the script with you. Leave me a note in the comments. Also related: HP’s study of Twitter; here in plainer English.