Social media site gauges mood of the US

Facebook has collated information from status updates over the past few years to find out when users in the US were happiest and when they were saddest.

Social media site Facebook has put together a Gross National Happiness Index to gauge the emotions of the US over the past few years.

By monitoring the positive and negative words used in status updates, the social networking site made a graph of when the country was happiest and saddest on the whole, Facebook data team member Adam Kramer wrote on the official blog.

The unhappiest day recorded was January 22nd 2008, which was the day of the Asian stock market crash and also when young actor Heath Ledger passed away.

"Some of the happiest days include US national holidays like Thanksgiving and fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter," Mr Kramer said.

He stressed that people's privacy was respected during the research and positive and negative words in statuses were picked up by a computer and not by a person scouring private updates.

This week, Web 2.0 practitioner Leon Benjamin claimed that the most valuable asset that social media sites possess is data about their users.

08/10/2009