2010: The Year in Facebook Statistics

This is a cool summary of 2010 in terms of Facebook-related statistics:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-life/item/19778-facebooks-2010-by-the-numb

With 500 million (!) users, Facebook is rapidly becoming a source of seemingly limitless data about how people live and interact in modern society.  Some of the highlights:

• Nearly 61 million people changed their relationship status to in a relationship / engaged / married
• Nearly 43 million people changed their relationship status to single
• Over 6000 pages were liked every second!  (Speaking of which, how about liking my page?)

The potential applications of analysis of this data, both good and bad, are mind blowing.  As previously noted, people have used Facebook data to identify peak break-up times and to predict someone’s sexual orientation based on their various connections and activity.