Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually include those two phrases? I call bullshit.
If it's 10,000 that match the query, then that's a more reasonable amount of data. Of course, the interpretation is still pretty shallow, and mere regex-matching for those phrases could be getting a lot of other crap, but at least it's a (just barely, given that they want to break it down day-by-day) decent sample size.
Using that ratio (50 updates/month), we can estimate that their 10,000 status updates cover 16 people over a year.
My first instinct was "why not?" but thinking about this more, that looks kind of thin. Of course, I'm assuming a lot of things away...
I would also argue that the pre-Christmas spike likely isn't because people are cheap. I think the main factor is that most people spend the holidays with family. Two possibilities come to mind: 1) one or both of the people in the relationship decide that the relationship is not worthwhile enough to take each other home to Mom and Dad, or 2) meeting the family over Thanksgiving leads to a breakup (it was awkward, the family didn't like the S.O., the S.O. didn't like the family, etc.).
All-in-all, I agree with the sentiment of several comments here that between the poorly-ripped image and the unjustified conclusions they jump to, the article is mostly crap.
From the article: Mondays, as if they weren't bad enough, are the most likely day to break up.
I was referring specifically to the shoddy article and its crap conclusions, not to the original data. The original data was interesting and potentially insightful.
Here is their source site which has a better version: http://www.geekosystem.com/facebook-breakup-graph/
Although this can be compounded in a different way. The first break-up mountain appears after Christmas and spikes after valentines, translation: he buys crappy Christmas presents and he forgets valentines!
The second mountain is in Nov/Dec, translation: I spend all my money on her, she hasn't bought dinner in three months and now I have to get her a Christmas present too?!
Interestingly Aug/Sep/Oct were the months I noticed this year that I spent a vast majority of my time in doors. I'd gotten over the novelty of hot weather (I work outside) and had been cowering inside, which meant lots of movie theaters and dinners with the wife.
Other than that, the title is total linkbait.
Has anyone taken Facebook data and seen if they could predict suicide or crime? Do people exhibit certain patterns before committing suicide or commiting some big crime spree?
It would also be interesting to see if it could determine if someone is cheating. Of course its harder to get data on when the cheating began to do a good analysis.
Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't going anywhere.
If everyone took the same amount of time to get over the last relationship (which is not true), then we can just start looking for singles just a couple months after the spikes.
What are the rules re: reposts of vias?
Ex-ante, though...I remember hearing somewhere that Zuckerberg used to predict when people were about to split, because they could see whose profiles you were looking at.
If you started checking out potential partners with a high frequency, and you were in a relationship, Zuck et al. knew it wouldn't last long.
