Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Tuesday, April 03 2012 @ 09:30 am
Last modified on
These days Facebook is getting a lot of criticism about their privacy policy, and while I have to agree that the amount of data Facebook collects on its users is staggering and more than a little scary, at least they're now putting it to good use. Enter Facebook Data, a team that "builds scalable platforms for the collection, management, and analysis of data."
Facebook Data recently released a report called "The Right Time for Love: Tracking The Seasonality of Relationship Formation." Using U.S. Facebook data from 2010 and 2011, the team looked at how different times of year affect the beginnings and endings of relationships. They started by examining changes from non-coupled relationship statuses (like "Single" or "Divorced") to coupled statuses (like "In a relationship" or "Engaged"), then compared that figure against the number of changes in the opposite direction.
They found that Christmas and Valentine's Day are both good days to try your luck in love. Far more people paired up on those days than split up:
Another big day for relationships shows that most Facebook users can take a joke, even when it comes to their relationships: April Fool's Day. As the fifth biggest day for a net increase in relationships, April 1st saw 20% more relationship initiations than splits. Many were clearly just in the spirit of the silly holiday, however, as the following day was the most extreme day in the other direction. April 2nd saw 11% more break-ups than new relationships.
Looking at the data on a monthly basis, summertime seemed to be the most problematic for relationships. In 2010 and 2011, May through August saw a low point in the daily net change in relationships across Facebook users of all age groups.
The Facebook Data team also found patterns at a weekly level. They discovered a net gain in relationships after the weekend - Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were the biggest days for the announcements of new romances to hit the social networking site. In contrast, breakups were more likely to be reported in the days leading up to the weekend, reaching a peak on Friday and Saturday.
In speculating on why these patterns exist, the Facebook Data team believes that "One explanation could be that people looking for a change tend to end their old relationships in time to spend the weekend with friends or get back in the game with someone new." Another theory is that "breaking up is hard to do, and having a difficult conversation has to wait until the work week winds down." To explain the net gain in relationships at the beginning of the week, the team posits that it "may be a visible echo of the weekend's festivities -- and the new social ties that result."
For information on how to use this social network to find people to date, you can read our Facebook review.