RSSFacebook Lexicon visualizes conversation trends on Facebook
April 15th, 2008
Facebook today announced the launch of Facebook Lexicon, a visualization tool reminiscent of Google Trends. Just as Google Trends measures and compares search query volume across multiple terms, Facebook Lexicon shows how frequently your search terms appear in Facebook Wall conversations over time.
Lexicon only counts profile, group, and event Wall conversations - it doesn’t count messages, chats, or application activity (feed items, notifications, or invitations). Facebook’s Roddy Lindsay also says that, “No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts.”
Unlike Google Trends, however, Facebook Lexicon doesn’t allow filtering by geographic region (a bit more complex in the Facebook environment, since the user’s IP may not always match their geographic region).
Facebook Lexicon will be a great way to get near-real time stats on the buzz surrounding current events. It should be a very valuable tool for the PR community!
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April 15th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Lexicon’s an interesting way to see when things become popular, but saying that “no human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts” isn’t really true. Right, Lexicon works by a computer that counts words. But the very nature of a wall is that it is public. Even if it’s limited just to the profile owner’s friends, it’s still not private one-on-one communication. Humans do read walls.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I think this is going to be a really interesting tool for marketers, particulary if you are in Facbook, if we can know when people are interested in a particular topic, targeting ads becomes much easier. I have a bunch of examples at http://www.facebooklexicon.com/
April 16th, 2008 at 7:01 am
[…] to Adam for this. It comes from Facebook Lexicon, a new trend-tracking tool for the social network that can tell you how often certain terms appear […]
April 30th, 2008 at 6:54 am
I’m bummed you can’t see any numbers. It basically makes this tool useless to me.