There are plenty of Facebook apps that promise to tell you your top five friends, explain just how compatible you are with your significant other, and even some that promise to tell you who is your best friend of all.
We’ve stopped clicking on any links to those kinds of apps because they tend to be filled with spam or require you to buy something before you can actually do what the app says you can. That is, if it even works (does anybody actually do these things)? Of course, by then, the app has posted itself on your wall, advertising to your friends, a few of which will click on the link, which will then post it on their wall, and so on.
We have no idea what possessed us to click on a link by a friend of ours that had an eerily-similar concept, but we did anyway. What we found when we clicked it was actually amazing, both because it wasn’t full of ads, but because it gave us a lot of useful, insightful information about our Facebook use.
The app is called Social Me and is published by a company called Zeebly. You probably haven’t heard of them as they’re relatively new, but what they do is awesome.
Social Me grabs your data and turns your Facebook use (and some of your friends’) into an infographic that explains just a small part of your life on Facebook. Frankly, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of data that Social Me translates, but what it does grab, it turns into some pretty interesting insights.
This isn’t stuff like who your top few friends are, but rather, how many words you’ve typed on Facebook in your entire user lifetime, and how many imaginative words you use. It doesn’t stop there; once it’s found out how many words you’ve typed, it compares it to a famous book like Charlotte’s Web and pats you on the back for writing more than E.B. White. It also takes the number of imaginative words you use and tells you whether you use more or less than a certain percentage of the population on Facebook. Of course, what Social Me decides is “imaginative” is not described, but the idea is that it tries to infer what your status updates and wall posts really mean in a statistical sense as opposed to purely numerically.
If you see a friend’s timeline or wall with a post from Zeebly or Social Me, do yourself a favour and give it a click! It’s very interesting to see how your Facebook activity translates into an infographic. The more people that use it, the more you’ll have to compare with. And with any luck, Zeebly is hard at work updating Social Me to include even more stats and detail.