The Facebook Blog

Natural disasters and human triumphs made their mark in our 2010 list of top trends in status updates, but more than anything else people wanted to spend time with their friends and family. The fastest growing trend was the use of a new digital shorthand for people to ask their friends to hang out.

Whether looking for something to do or just getting off work, people began to add "HMU" to their status updates when they were ready to meet their friends. Standing for "hit me up," the acronym was barely used last year but grew suddenly and... steadily throughout 2010, especially during summer breaks and weekends.

We're bringing the Facebook Gross National Happiness index to 18 additional countries today, including Germany, India and Spain. As before, we analyzed the use of positive and negative words in status updates to estimate the happiness of people on Facebook in each of the countries.

We chose the countries based on those with the highest volumes of status updates in one of the languages that we currently support: English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. This is because we need a large number of status updates in order to build a model that is... not easily affected by random variations in word usage. Our methodology also requires us to have reliable, validated dictionaries of positive and negative words in the languages we analyze, which is why we do not yet support all languages.

We found that a country's happiness score is representative of the country's culture and experience on a particular day. Besides popular holidays like Christmas and New Year's Day, we see a spike in Spain's happiness index corresponding to Saint Jordi's day in Apri. In India, Holi in March and its Independence Day in August also lead to peaks, as do big sports victories in many of the countries. In the United States, we see similar spikes every Super Bowl.

Sports also can lead to some of the lowest days in the happiness index. Ireland's score drops on Nov 18, 2009, when FIFA awarded a controversial win to France over Ireland in the World Cup playoffs. Similarly, Germany's happiness level dips on Nov 10, 2009, when the goalie Robert Enke committed suicide.

Unsurprisingly, disasters have a dramatic effect on happiness levels. We see a large dip in India's index on Nov. 27, 2008, the day of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We also notice a huge drop in Chile's index, corresponding to the tragic earthquake on Feb. 27, 2010. Chile's happiness index has still not fully recovered. When another earthquake of a magnitude 6.3 hit central Italy on April 6, 2009, its happiness score dropped, as did Mexico's index between April 24-29, 2009, during the H1N1 flu outbreak and an earthquake.

Check out the graph yourself and see if you can find a significant day in your country.

Cultural differences also play a role in people's weekly happiness cycles and how they celebrate holidays. South Africans are happier on Fridays than Saturdays, a weekly cycle different from that of other countries. In several countries such as Spain and Germany, people are more festive on Christmas Eve than on Christmas Day. One week later, Singaporeans are happier on New Year's Day than New Year's Eve.

Measuring Happiness over Time

Because each country is analyzed separately to reduce effects due to language differences, we cannot directly compare one country's Gross National Happiness to another country's. However, we can compare how the indices of different countries are changing: We can determine whether people on Facebook in specific countries are becoming more or less happy over time. We examined these trends from September 2008 through the present. The results, as well as all the countries with Gross National Happiness indices, are shown below.



Some countries like the U.S. and Canada are seeing increases in both positivity and decreases in negativity. Other countries like India see decreases in negativity, but changes in positivity are not statistically significant. We see an increase in both positivity and negativity in Spain and almost all Spanish-speaking countries. Singaporeans and South Africans, on the other hand, are decreasing their use of emotional words overall.

As always, no one at Facebook reads status updates to conduct this analysis. Instead, computers do the calculations after all personally identifiable information is removed.


Lisa, an intern on Facebook's data team, is now back at the University of Waterloo improving Canadian happiness.

In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam argues that Americans have grown increasingly disconnected from their friends and family, and that technology—particularly television—is to blame. Since then, social psychologists have engaged in heated arguments about the role of technology in our everyday lives.

"Bowling Alone" was published well before the advent of online social networking, and Facebook aims to reduce that very isolation Putnam laments by facilitating sharing with the people we care the most about.

So how well are we doing? A... group of Facebook's data scientists and I decided to measure social well-being on Facebook to find out. We discovered that the more people use Facebook, the better they feel and that those who share and communicate the most with their friends feel even better.

• Christmas, New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day are still among the happiest... days for all of these nations, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday are happiest days of the week.


Canadians are happier the day before Canadian Thanksgiving (a Sunday) than on the actual Canadian Thanksgiving Day (a Monday).


Australia's index was lowest on Feb. 13, 2008—the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in Parliament to indigenous Australians—reflecting the 4 percent of Aussie status updates containing the word "sorry."


Happiness levels in the UK seem to have the least variation, with the fewest large peaks among all the graphs due to holidays.

As before, we analyzed the number of positive and negative words in English status updates for these nations. This was done on anonymous data, and no one at Facebook read any of the actual status messages. Read more about the research from our data team.


Originally Published Monday, Oct. 5, 2009
Every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point, and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now.

Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. At Facebook, we're always looking for ways to help people better understand the world around them, and we're interested in how people express their emotions with one other and the world. So earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates.

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.

Though more countries or languages may be added later, the current result is notable since it is based on the updates of all English-speaking U.S. Facebook users. In this sense, it can count as an indicator of "Gross National Happiness," a metric only measured currently via Gallup polls and national surveys in countries such as France and Bhutan. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

For our Gross National Happiness index, we adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay" and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt" and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Over time, we've seen spikes in the index for different days of the year. Some of the happiest days include U.S. national holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter. Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008—when the U.S. was celebrating the election of President Barack Obama—was over twice as happy as the average Wednesday.



It's not all rosy, though: The index also shows two remarkably unhappy days. The lowest was Jan. 22, 2008, which was the day the Asian stock market crashed and coincidentally the same day as the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger. The recent death of cultural icon Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, came in as the second least happy day in the past two years.

How happy will all of us be tomorrow, on our birthdays or during the World Cup? It depends on you and what you decide to share about how you're feeling with your friends through your status updates.


Adam, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook's data team, is 72 percent happier than the average person on Facebook.

As Facebook engineers, we are surrounded by engaging technical problems to solve. We've recently tackled efficient photo storage, distributed computation and crowdsourced translations, to name a few. While we're working on inventive solutions on a daily basis, we can't do it alone.

Today, we're announcing the Facebook Fellowship Program to support Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year who can help solve some of the biggest challenges facing the social web and Internet technology. We believe that the academic community plays a central... role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world.

We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval. Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in these topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships, which will cover their tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits.

If you or someone you know fits the requirements above, we want to hear from you. To be sure our first fellows receive funding in time for the upcoming school year, we are working on the following tight deadlines:

One of the most common questions we're asked at Facebook is, "How many friends can you have?" It's an increasingly important question as more people around the world share and connect on Facebook and on the Web overall, but it's also difficult to answer. While the average user on Facebook has 120 confirmed friend connections, that number doesn't account for all the different types of relationships people have in their lives. Thanks to recent research from the Facebook Data Team, we're getting closer to an answer.

Earlier today, I gave a keynote... address at the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York in which I introduced a new way to look at the relationships people maintain on Facebook--what we're calling your "active network." Your active network consists of all the people with whom you stay up to date. What makes your active network different from other networks is the way you communicate with the people in it.

Think about the ways you communicate with your friends--whether on or off Facebook. The communication likely falls into one of two traditional types: reciprocal communication or direct communication. Reciprocal communication is a conversation where messages are exchanged back and forth. This can include talking on the telephone, or on Facebook it can mean a Wall-to-Wall exchange or real-time chat. Direct communication occurs when you send a message to someone specific, with or without the expectation of a reply. It can be a one-way Inbox message or Wall post on Facebook, or sending an old fashioned letter or an e-mail.

On Facebook, there's a third and new way you communicate--through the stream. Every time you log into your home page you see a running timeline or stream of the information being shared by your friends and the other things you're connected with on Facebook. The more people share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections.

This stream communication, rather than reciprocal and direct communication, forms your active network. Whenever you interact with a story in the stream--whether you "Like" a piece of content, comment on it or simply click on it--the person sharing it becomes part of your active network. When our Data Team measured active networks for users on Facebook, it found that, in any given month, users keep up with between 2 times and 4 times more people than through more traditional communication.



The other impact of the active network is that it leads to greater connectedness between the people in someone's network. Take, for example, my colleague Alex Smith, one of the data researchers at Facebook. He is connected with co-workers, college friends, high school buddies and family--all on Facebook. As he engages in reciprocal and direct communication, there is little to no connectedness among the people in his network. His active network, though, is much denser, showing connections stretching across the different groups of friends in his network because his interactions in the stream make it easier for people in his network to find one another.



With greater connectedness has come the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency. We've seen this lead to people spreading information and organizing events on a mass scale, often within days and weeks. For example, within weeks of T-Mobile airing an advertisement, Facebook users organized thousands of people to recreate the ad with a "Silent Dance" at the same station.

Advertising on Facebook follows a similar pattern. Our Engagement Ads on the home page allow you to take common activities like commenting, RSVPing for an event or giving a virtual gift directly in the ad. If any of your friends have already taken an action, that appears in the ad as well. We've found that interaction with those ads increases 50 percent when someone sees a friend's action, such as a comment.

We've only just begun to see the opportunities being created as people maintain more relationships and increase their influence.


Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook's chief operating officer.