Squandrous

According to an article in Fast Company, Facebook’s data team has been analyzing happiness indicators for various countries over the past year. From Fast Company:

Back in October 2009 Facebook began this experiment, using anonymized status updates from its U.S. users and correlating key words inside them with the Gross National Happiness Index (a movement dedicated to assessing how cheery or upset a nation’s citizens are.) Essentially Facebook’s data team picked key phrases that relate to positive or negative emotions, made a frequency count of their occurrence and look at how the resulting data trends over time.

Among the conclusions? We all love Fridays and don’t particularly love Mondays. Also, a few great observations about Canada:

• Canadian happiness about Thanksgiving peaks the evening before Thanksgiving day. Since the day itself is a Monday, it seems the Canadians are subject to the same Monday woes as the rest of the world.
• Canadian happiness is affected by a little cross-border feeling from the U.S.—happiness indices show small peaks on July 4th and U.S. Thanksgiving.
• While everybody likes Valentine’s day, it looks like the Canadians like it the most.

For more on Facebook’s data team, check out their Facebook page.