When I discovered the Facebook activity log, my first idea was to try to scrape this data and analyze it. Since I signed up for Facebook in 2004, there should be over 8 years of likes, comments, searches, and other data to sift through.
For those of you that haven’t looked at it, the activity log looks like this:
However, there doesn’t seem to be an xml or json version of this feed (that I can find, anyway). So I resorted to my next option, which was downloading my entire account:
This compiles every aspect of your Facebook account into a text file and emails it to you. Unfortunately, it takes almost 12 hours to receive the email. The first time I tried it, I got this message:
I’ve been re-trying this export, in hopes that I might get lucky and get 8 years of Facebook activity into a text file, but haven’t had any luck so far.
So I resorted to my backup plan, which was visualizing a week’s worth of key logging using LogKextClient.
I found that I talked about live streaming, cajun food, and Max/MSP patches a lot this week. It wasn’t a very surprising study, but if I’m able to run the analysis on my Facebook data, I think I would be able to discover much more information about the last decade.