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.

Webware published a very good introduction to Facebook: Newbie’s guide to Facebook. This introduction gives you:

• A definition of what is FB
• The way to setup an account/Profile
• Advices on security/Privacy settings
• A definition of Poking and how to use it
• Advices on the way to share information with friends
• A short description of the FB platform
• A list of addons to enhance the FB experience

I would have loved to find this introduction on FB earlier when I was a newbie to FB.

According to this article from eMarketer, Facebook is now the fourth web site worldwide in terms of traffic. The graph below is taken from the article:

Found via FaceReview.

Mashable published a handy list of tools for LinkedIn. Those tools are mainly plugins or widgets to grab your LinkedIn profile and display it on your blog or on Facebook.

The New York Times made a graph that shows the impact of school networking in the world of Wall Street:

This graph made me also discover Oliver Sarkozy (brother of actual french president) among the banker who will count tomorrow

The very serious Financial Times published on his web site a few days ago this call for advice:

I work in an advertising agency and my boss (who is quite cool) has just asked to be my friend on Facebook. I feel invaded – I’m passionate about my work but want to keep it separate from the rest of my life. I definitely don’t want him spying on what I say to my friends. He has also asked other people in the office who have said Yes and they seem to think it’s fine. But I don’t want to. Can I say No without damaging my career?

Advertising creative, female, 26

This is rather a new kind of problem generated by social networking sites like Facebook. And it’s symptomatic that this has been reported on Facebook. As actually Facebook appear to be both a networking site for professional and personal linking. The solution proposed by  Lucy Kellaway from FT.com is rather drastic: stop using Facebook. But Facebook should offer in the future the ability to separate your work friends from your social ones.