The world is filled with data, and with the massive explosion of the internet and social networking sites it has been easier than ever to gather this data from and in the same place. The hard part is analysing them in a way that will yield original, interesting and truthful results.
Facebook has people's data. They put it there themselves. David McCandless, data journalist, realised this and performed a study on Facebook to locate a possible seasonality in break-ups. His theory is interesting, but also flawed (as pointed out in Digital Society). What is an important take-away from this (apart from the fact that people liked talking about Rihanna and Chris Brown - a lot) is the unbelievable potential that lies within Facebook for data mining and exploitation, and the ways in which it can help us understand the world more than anything else.
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