Startup Idea: Facebook Friendship Analytics App

Startup idea to develop a 'Facebook Friendship Analytics' companion application that analyzes users' friends' visible data on Facebook. The intent is to provide statistical feedback and insights into social media behavior patterns, promoting transparency and comparative understanding of individuals' online activity amongst their immediate social network.

I have a social media related application problem that I have been eager to see resolved.

Every time I use Facebook I feel kind of sad because I see how happy everyone is and all of their nice photos. It might be an unconscious bias that is making me think that I am seeing that everyone is happy, when in fact it might not be true. I think an empirically driven system of feedback would help improve the "quality of social media life" issues that users are facing that current research is reporting. This is leading to many people abandoning facebook for alternative platforms.

I think that you should propose to develop a "Facebook Friendship Analytics" companion application that does a basic descriptive statistical analysis of all of your friends visible data and compiles and analyzes that data into an easy to read summary for individuals. It might be trend charts that show on average how many likes people are getting day to day, or may be it summarizes how many positive/negative comments people are posting, or maybe it shows how many people logged into facebook that day. I know facebook probably keeps all of this data secret. But I think more empirical transparency would probably help users understand their emotions, experiences, and online activity compared to their immediate friendship network. I am not sure what facebook's policy on crawling and collecting and representing facebook data would be. But I think they should implement a system, perhaps you and your team could provide a demonstration model of how it would look and act within the larger facebook user interface.

I think the "Facebook Friendship Analytics" companion app could be customizable, so that users could monitor aggregate statistics related to their friends online activity. Some might be interested in the political activity of their friends. Whereas others might be interested in the frequency of baby photos and birthday parties posted. Also, this would promote statistical literacy and transparency.