Facebook knows what you talk about, just like Twitter. But its edge is that it also knows who you are. Facebook’s newest APIs let select news outlets view search and see your public posts, plus it tallies keyword mentions and collects the demographic data of everyone mentioning certain keywords. But it’s confirmed to me that “We see the potential for these tools to be really useful down the line for brands and agencies. That will definitely come in the coming weeks.” It all started with Facebook Lexicon. Built by one of Facebook’s early data scientists Roddy Lindsay, Lexicon launched to little fanfare back in 2008 and let you see the relative frequency of how often different keywords appeared in wall posts. Similar to Google Trends, you couldn’t see the exact number of times people mentioned “Iraq,” but could see how popularity of the term waxed and waned.
