What's Up on Facebook

Facebook has become more than a community—it’s like a virtual world within our real world. You already know you can spend hours browsing profiles and learning about people you do and do not know (unless they have strict privacy settings). But what if you want to find out what’s going on in Facebook on a larger scale?

Try browsing one or more of your network’s main pages. On these pages, you can learn more about the networks you belong to with a list of members, what’s popular, statistics, events, marketplace posts and more. The most information will be available on regional and school networks—of course, the bigger the better for tabulating the information!

Want to know even more about the Facebook users of the world? Try Lexicon (available when logged in to the site at Facebook.com/Lexicon) to find out what people are talking about. Dragging words from all public and semi-public forms—including profiles, events and groups—Facebook creates a graph of the prevalence of words and phrases. Don’t worry—all the information is anonymous and is never pulled from chats, messages, invitations or searches. Lexicon does all the work and all you do is type in a search world. Or compare two: the word “president” stayed pretty consistent at the bottom of the page, while “beer” was much higher the entire time, with a peak suspiciously near St. Patrick’s Day.

Similar to the set-up of Google Trends, this is an excellent way to get a general idea of the latest and greatest. But dates and exact numbers are not available for anything specific—so if you are looking for details for a research paper, it’s best to try somewhere else! [Mashable]