One of the most fun things about Facebook is that it lets you look at friend groups from a digital, impartial perspective.
Unfortunately, up until now the people offering Facebook analyses have been by and large snake oil salesmen, forcing you to install a cumbersome app or one that will auto-post an advertisement.
Luckily, Wolfram Alpha has their own Facebook analysis tool and it is magnificent.
Wolfram Alpha -- a site that was created by Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the highly important Mathematica software -- is the gold standard when it comes to calculation on the internet, so it's no surprise that its Facebook analyzer is awesome.
Here are some of the coolest things I learned from running my page through the service.
I've been posting a lot more links since I've worked for Business Insider.
This was really cool. I tend to post status updates later in the day but links during the 9 to 5 workday.
I tend to post short statuses and average 8.6 Likes per post.
I don't use the Facebook iPhone or Android app very much.
When we started looking at my friends, it got a lot more interesting. I was wondering why there was a male skew in the gender profile until I realized that going to an all-male Catholic high school would cause such a shift.
A couple of my friends are all over the world right now. I know a few who are doing research or service abroad.
Identifying the social butterflies here. A bunch of these people ran for student government, so this essentially makes sense. Most people I know had between 400 and 1,000 Facebook friends.
Here's the crown jewel of the Wolfram Alpha Facebook analysis. This is a chart showing all the connections between my friends.
It's not super interesting unless you have context, and I was able to discern a whole bunch of cool things based on who was in each group:
Looking even deeper, you can see even more sub-groups and why certain people are in certain places. I was also able to look at why the outliers with no connections were like that.
When we look at only the men -- recall I went to an all-male high school -- something even cooler happens with the new group breakdowns.
