Facebook Launches Tool to Measure the Happiness of Its Users

People in general are concerned with their happiness. But as much as they are concerned for themselves they are much more interested in other people's happiness. Knowing how your neighbor across the street is doing is one thing but what if you could know how the entire country or even the whole world is feeling? Well now you can with Facebook's new Gross National Happiness tool, which tries to determine the general state of happiness for all Facebook users of the English version of the site in the US.

“Every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives,” Adam D. I. Kramer, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon interning at Facebook, wrote. “Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling.” This idea led to a project that started earlier this year at Facebook to measure the mood of Facebook users based on what they wrote every day.

“The result was an index that measures how happy people on Facebook are from day-to-day by looking at the number of positive and negative words they're using when updating their status. When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual,“ Kramer added.

The feature is live now for the US but Facebook is hoping to add more countries at a later date. Facebook analyzes the status messages from all of the users and looks for certain keywords that are indicative of the mood of the message. This is all done automatically so there should be no privacy concerns. Facebook searches for words like "happy," "yay" and "awesome" to determine if it is a positive message and words like "sad," "doubt" and "tragic" for negative messages.

The method is based on earlier research from a number of scientists in the past two decades and uses an adaptation of text analysis software called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The data is aggregated and displayed in a nice-looking graph that goes back two years and also allows users to zoom in at just a couple of weeks.