The Facebook Blog

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.

• 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.

Status updates on Facebook help people understand their friends and the people around them--how they're feeling, what they're doing and what they're thinking. In the United States alone, people on Facebook are sharing hundreds of millions of words every day, thousands per second, in status updates. When taken as a whole, these words offer a unique barometer into the issues, world events and thoughts that are connecting people.

In the tradition of year-end lists, we're introducing Facebook Memology. "Memology" refers to the study of how "memes,"... or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year's list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009.

While significant news events and celebrities made the list, more personal topics like family, religion and even emerging digital slang were as common—no doubt reflecting the way people share their daily lives with friends on Facebook.

To generate the list, we started by looking at how many times each phrase with length from one-to-four words occurred in U.S. Facebook status updates, then we computed the rate at which each phrase occurred in 2009 compared to 2008. Using some data-mining methods detailed here, we analyzed important bursts in activity around words and series of words to find the key trends for the year. All personally identifiable information was removed from the status updates to conduct this analysis, and no one at Facebook read the individual status updates.

Because quite a few words and phrases were related to each other and correlated contextually, we grouped some of them together to form the final list that follows.

1 - Facebook Applications

Specific words: Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living

Facebook has provided a platform for developers to create a number of hugely popular applications, and it is no surprise that people are talking about them. You could almost say that 2009 was the year of the farm in status updates. Since its emergence in June 2009, Farmville became the most talked-about application in status updates and now boasts over 72 million monthly active users. It wasn't alone. Farm Town also ranked highly, as did general discussions with the word "farm."

2 - FML

Specific word: FML

This digital slang became the hottest acronym to enter the Facebook lexicon in 2009. It spread from relatively low usage to become a mainstream word in status updates. FML is used almost exclusively online and in text messages, and its meaning, once very specific, has broadened. People now use it simply to express some frustration with an aspect of their lives. We'll leave the "F" open to your interpretation, but the "M" and L" stand for "My Life."

The beginning of May appeared to be a seriously frustrating time for people, when students were busy with finals and the weather was rainy just before summer. We saw a lull in "FML" in the summer months and, as expected, there was strong weekly periodicity to this term with it appearing most often on Mondays and Tuesdays.

3 - Swine Flu

Specific words: Flu, Swine Flu, H1N1

Swine flu, or H1N1, was probably the biggest ongoing news story of the year. Discussion of H1N1 in status updates reached a peak in the spring—long before the flu itself began affecting many people. When flu season began in the fall, people began discussing the term again, though never with the same frequency as when it first appeared. Another interesting trend is that no one called the virus H1N1 when it first appeared, but by September the effort to disassociate the term "swine" from the illness was fairly successful and "H1N1" occurrences now roughly equal "swine." Surprisingly, the use of the word "flu" over the year consistently peaked during the middle of the week and was at its lowest on Sundays. We're not sure why.

4 - Celebrity Deaths

Specific words: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays

No celebrity death had as immediate of an impact on status updates as Michael Jackson's. Mentions of his name were 10,000 times higher on June 25, the day he died, than the previous day, and no other unexpected news event can compare to the burst we saw on that day. Despite the huge impact of this story, mentions of his name lasted only about a week, with a resurgence during his memorial 12 days later. Rather surprisingly, Patrick Swayze's death was almost as large with about two-thirds as many mentions as Michael Jackson's on the peak day of status updates about Swayze.

5 - Family

Specific words: Family, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Kids

As Facebook becomes more prevalent across demographics, people talk more about "mom," "dad," "son" and "daughter". We saw significant increases in all sorts of family-related words during 2009. Perhaps the most dramatic increase was "kids," a word whose occurrence went up by a factor of five.

6 - Movies

Specific words: New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity and Harry Potter

Whenever a new movie comes out, it creates a big spike in discussion in Facebook status updates. The most-discussed of 2009 was "New Moon." It narrowly edged out the big summer movies "Harry Potter" and "Transformers." Other big movies on Facebook were "Star Trek," "The Hangover" and "Paranormal Activity".

7 - Sports

Specific words: Steelers, Yankees

In February of 2009, the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl, and in October the New York Yankees won the World Series. The Steelers reached a higher peak in mentions, but largely because they only played a single football game to garner the top prize. The Yankees were discussed a bit less per day, but the discussion occurred over a longer period of time throughout the multiple games of baseball's World Series. We'll call this one a tie to avoid playing favorites or sparking sports-supremacy debates.

8 - Health Care

Specific words: Health Care, No one should have to…

Since President Barack Obama took office, the discussion of "health care" has risen steadily in status updates. This reached a peak in early September when millions of pro-reform users updated their status with the following message: "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day." For two days, millions of people posted this to their profiles in support of health care reform. The meme continued to circulate, gradually declining over the weeks that followed. Even aside from that meme, health care mentions are up 10 times since a year ago.

9 - FB

Specific words: FB, FB Friends, News Feed

Whenever we make a change to the site a lot of people chime in with their opinions. For instance, we see spikes in mentions of "News Feed" on the order of 100-times increases whenever there is a change to the way that feature works or how the home page is laid out. "FB" and "FB Friends," on the other hand, have nothing to do with product changes, but as Facebook has become more prevalent people are shortening our name for convenience. Usage of the word "FB" has increased about 7 fold since the beginning of 2009 and "FB Friends" increased about 10 times over the same period.

10 - Twitter

Specific words: Twitter, RT

Talk about Twitter took off at the beginning of the year. April showed a peak of activity and momentum, though mentions of the word "Twitter" decreased over the past few months. The acronym "RT," standing for "retweet," entered the lexicon along with the word "Twitter" in September of 2008 and has become a common acronym to describe reposting activity.

11 - Years

Specific words: 2008, 2009, 2010

Many status updates are about what people are going to do or have just done, so naturally they often contain dates. While the number of posts containing a date didn't go up dramatically in 2009, the date itself changed to reflect the current and upcoming year.

12 - Lady Gaga

Specific words: Gaga, Poker Face

Lady Gaga was the biggest new performer of 2009 based on status updates from people in the U.S. She was virtually unmentioned until November of 2008 and spiked in mentions of her name in September of 2009 during the MTV Video Music Awards. At the end of September, Christopher Walken's performance of the song "Poker Face" caused a spike in that term, but didn't noticeably impact occurrences of "Lady Gaga."

13 - Yard

Specific word: Yard

This is a trend that nobody would have guessed. The word "yard" seems fairly uncommon, and indeed it barely breaches a rate of five mentions in every 10,000 status updates. When we compare 2009 to 2008, however, we see a huge increase. Have all the hipsters turned to yard work as the latest fad? Probably not. A more likely explanation is that hipsters' moms and dads are also on Facebook, and these folks have yards that require some tending.

14 - Religion

Specific words: Easter, Lord, God

Religious terms increased a significant amount in the last year. In the last 6 months, there was a noticeable upward trend in occurrences of "Lord" and "God." While "Easter" occurs infrequently most of the time, the Easter Sunday spike from 2009 is about 30 percent higher than it was in 2008.

15 - I

Specific words: I, is

Until March of 2009, people updated their status in a box that appeared next to their name on the home page and, consequently, many updates started with the word "is." Once that box no longer was shown next to people's name, the usage of "is" dropped off dramatically and usage of "I" doubled almost overnight. Prior to March of 2009, "is" represented about 9 percent of all words in status updates. With the change in interface, it remained high in absolute terms, but dropped all the way to about 1.5 percent recently while "I" increased from 1 percent to about 2.5 percent.


Lars Backstrom, a data scientist at Facebook, is heading to Iowa to investigate some farms.

Don't be the last to know about what's happening with your friends, family or co-workers just because you're away from your computer. You now can subscribe to receive text messages of your friends' status updates directly from their profiles.

Click on the "Subscribe via SMS" link below your friends' profile pictures to get their latest news while you are mobile. You can also comment on your friends' status updates directly from your phone by replying to the text messages you receive. You can even subscribe to mobile updates from the Facebook... Pages of your favorite celebrities, public figures, businesses and organizations.


If you already have Facebook Mobile activated for your phone or device, then you will begin receiving the text message updates after confirming your subscription. If you haven't yet set up Facebook Mobile, you will be taken through a series of steps to activate it before receiving text messages.

While Facebook does not charge for this service, your mobile-service provider's standard text messaging rates will apply so be sure to check with your provider. You can stop receiving text message status updates from your friends and connections at any time. Unsubscribe in one of three ways: reply directly from your mobile phone with "unsubscribe," return to a friend's profile and click the "Unsubscribe from SMS Updates" link or edit your mobile texts settings from the Mobile settings page.

If you're not able to sign-up yet, keep checking back. We're working to expand this to more and more people around the world. As of now, we're able to offer this service in 18 countries, where we have existing relationships with mobile service providers, like the U.S., U.K., South Africa, Indonesia and New Zealand.

We're constantly working to add new mobile features for Facebook. Learn more about all of the mobile options on Facebook, from device-specific applications to our m.facebook.com mobile site, on our Facebook Mobile page.


Phil, an engineer, loves getting status updates texted to his phone in real-time.

When we introduced the new Friends Page last week, our goal was to help you find and organize all of your connections. Since then, we heard from many of you that you want to be able to filter your friends by those who've recently updated their profiles and to quickly view a stream of their status updates. As a result, we've added both of those options.

From your Friends Page, you can choose the "recently updated" filter on the left side. This will show you which of your friends have posted new profile pictures; updated the Info tab sections... such as Basic Info, Contact Info, Personal Info, and Education and Work; or recently connected with Facebook Pages.

From your home page, the filters on the left side now also include "status updates." By selecting that filter, you will only see the text updates from your friends in your stream. If you don't see the "status updates" filter right away, click the "More" link beneath your list of filters. You can drag the filter to the top of the list to set your friends' status updates as the default view of your home page stream.

We've added the filter for status updates to your home page, rather than the Friends Page, because the two play different roles on the site. The home page focuses on showing you what you're friends are sharing, while giving you options for filtering that content. The Friends Page is the place for organizing and finding friends.

Keep your feedback coming as we introduce features and changes in the future.


Alexandre, a designer at Facebook, is checking out his friends' latest updates.