Posted by Jay Livingston
Valentine’s Day was Friday – that is like so last week.
Facebook has been publishing some research they’ve done on their big data, particularly on relationships. The day after Valentine’s day, they published a graph showing the change in FB interactions* that people have in the month before and after a break-up.** (The full post is here.)
The baseline (1.0) is the average interaction activity for an individual. For some, that 1.0 might mean 2 interactions per day, for others 20 or 200. What the graph shows is the change relative to that baseline.
Most obviously, a breakup is the occasion for a huge increase in FB activity – more than triple the usual amount. Presumably, these are heartfelt expressions of support and sympathy from FB friends. But the sentiment, or at least its expression on Facebook, is short-lived – a huge dropoff after the first day. Apparently FB friends think anyone can have another you by tomorrow. Or maybe these were not the “desert-island, all time, top five most memorable split-ups” of High Fidelity. Whatever. In a few days, the interaction level is back to what it was the day before the breakup. How come u don’t message me any more?
The other interesting pattern is the slight increase in the two days before the break up and the generally elevated level – about 50% higher – in the month after. The Facebook researchers do not provide any specific content (they are using anonymous, aggregate data – damn), so we don’t know whether the newly decoupled are looking to start new romances or whether they just have more time for general online sociability.
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* Interactions included the “number of messages they sent and received, the number of posts from others on their timeline and the number of comments from others on their own content.”
** To be in the breakup sample, people had to have been “in a relationship” for at least for weeks and then changed that relationship status.
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