The “don’t-call-it-a-search” engine Wolfram|Alpha on Thursday unveiled a new tool giving Facebook users unprecedented amounts of detail about their Facebook profiles — including geographic and age distributions of all of their Friends, a user’s “most Liked” post, and graphs of peak activity, for just some examples.
But Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t stop there: It then combines all of this granular, comprehensive data from a user’s Facebook profile with its own vast “knowledge base,” of general facts, giving a user the exact weather forecast at the date and time of their birth, for example.
As Wolfram|Alpha’s eponymous founder, mathematician Stephen Wolfram writes in a blog post on the new feature:
“When you type “facebook report”, Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.”
Users must affirmatively “opt-in” to access the feature by visiting Wolfram|Alpha and typing in “Facebook report,” where they’ll be greeted by the following screen alerting them that they are about to connect the two services together, handing their Facebook data over to Wolfram|Alpha to use as it wishes:
