Today we're excited to preview the next version of Lexicon. With over 100 million active users on Facebook, Lexicon graphs are a powerful way to understand the trends in what people are talking about. We've introduced a number of new ways to play with the data in this version, and many of the enhancements are based on your feedback over the last couple of months.

Lexicon only gathers text from Walls and never accesses messages, Chat, searches, or other private data. All the information is aggregated so it is never tied to a specific person. This gives you the ability to hear the diverse voices of Facebook without singling out individual people.

One of the most frequent suggestions we received was to show exactly how many times each topic was mentioned, so we now show you a Dashboard with the total number of unique users who mentioned a topic, as well as the percentage of our user base that mentioned the topic and the total number of posts. You can use the Demographics feature to follow the trends over time between users of different ages, genders, and countries. The Maps feature shows you where people are talking about a topic within different countries.

The Sentiment feature shows how much people like or dislike a given topic. You can compare two topics to see how the sentiment about each topic matches up. The Associations feature allows you to see words and phrases that are closely associated with a topic in different points in time. Finally, the Pulse feature highlights keywords that frequently show up in the Profiles (Interests, Music, etc.) of people who are talking about a topic on Walls.