Alec Saunders published an interesting post that describes how to do some quick data mining with Facebook. The starting point is to click on the advertisers link at the bottom of any Facebook page. Follow the steps as described by Alec up to the audience choice. That’s where the data mining can be done. For instance  Facebook reports that there are 1,053,740 people located in France:

If more accuracy is required, we may select only women. There are  319,600  Women located in France:

We can do the same for Men. There are 321,440 men located in France.

There are slightly more men, but there is almost a perfect balance between men and women. The strange thing is if we add Men + Women located in France, we get 641,040 (and not 1,053,740). This means that about 400,000 people didn’t complete the sex information in their profile. This point shows the limit of accuracy of Facebook data mining.

Another interesting finding is the difference between single and married people. There are 166,280 Singles.

And there are 56,540 married people.

We can explain the fact that there are more single people because there are more young people (under 25 so not married yet). It will be interesting to check those figures in a few months to see how the network evolves.