What happens to your Facebook when you fall in love?
Wondering whether your 'dating' status is about to turn into a relationship?
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Facebook may have the answer before you do.
As part of a couples-themed study undertaken by the social networking giant for Valentines Day, Facebook data scientists analyzed timeline posts between Facebook users who had entered relationships.
Study head Carlos Duik said he found that in the 100 days leading up to he day when users change their relationship status, the number of timeline posts increased significantly.
The amount of exchanges peaked 12 days before the beginning of the relationship change, with 1.67 posts a day, according to Venture Beat.
However after that, timeline post activity decreases.
'Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world,' Diuk wrote in a blog post yesterday.
Diuk also analyzed how the sentiment of the timeline posts changed over time, and found positive feelings increased significantly around the day when the relationship begins.
He said that even though the number of posts exchanged between the couple decreased once they get together, the sentiment of the exchanges became 'sweeter'.
This is because of anniversaries and special shared moments, he said.
The study involved data mined from some 460,000 couples and 18 million posts, Diuk said.
Another part of the couples-themed analysis purports to have determined which American cities are most popular among single people.
The top five, in order, were found to be Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Memphis.
Facebook data scientist Mike Develin also identified the five cities with the highest probability of a relationship being formed.
He said Colorado Springs, Colorado; El Paso, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Fort Worth, Texas, and San Antonio, Texas.
'In a city where everyone is paired up, the incentive to pair up is even stronger, while cities like New York and Miami are places that people go to be single,' Develin wrote.
The Facebook user base is more than one billion.
The data science team will deliver one more study about break ups as part of the Valentines series.
