I’ve had, in my back pocket, a spreadsheet that I’ve been meaning to blog about. But because I was lazy in copying, saving and uploading charts, I never got around to doing it. But now that Google Charts API is available, it’s so easy! I started constructed a spreadsheet from my Facebook friends list a couple of months ago in order to figure out some statistics which I could then use for bloggery analysis. One thing that I was worried about was that my list would lean heavily towards the last few years but surprisingly I have many people on my list from elementary school (and I wouldn’t say only my friends, since there are people who used to pick on me).

The first question I wanted to answer was where I met people. I broke it down into 5 categories:

• People I met in elementary school,
• People I met in middle and high school,
• People I met during university,
• People I met while working, either volunteering, coop, or full-time, and finally
• Other people I met randomly such as through friends, as part of an activity, or in my family.

Here is my nicely pie-looking breakdown:

I was really surprised that my friends from university didn’t dominate the pie. Everyone I met at university is online and technical, so they would be prime candidates for Facebook; yet after adding everyone I could find, I only met a third of my friends from university. Part of the reason might be because I met people who went to Waterloo during Coop, and they ended up in the Work piece. That is the main reason why my work group is so large, because I don’t go about asking people I work with what their Facebook account is.

In the future, I expect the Randomly piece to start increasing, since I’ve basically saturated the people I know or want to add or they are Facebook-holdouts in the other areas.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: facebook, geeky