The new visualisations will show five different “network roles” that can be identified: social insiders (lots of friends in common) and outsiders (few mutual friends), social neighbours (few friends outside of network) and gateways (lots of friends outside network), and social connectors.

The images will now feature colour coding for a number of interesting properties, like relationship status, age, sex and number of likes, along with the ability to filter networks according to criteria such as location and age. This aims to help users unlock a variety of interactive visualisations, allowing them to find patterns and ask questions.

In a blog post, John Burnham, R&D fellow for special projects, says: “Wolfram|Alpha has tons of data about the real world. And we can now combine that data with your Facebook profile to tell you interesting things you might not otherwise know. For example, by analysing your friends’ locations, we can now give even more detail about their geographical relationships to you (based on either hometown or current location). We can show you your most “geographically interesting’” friends, like who is closest to the North Pole or the equator, who is farthest away from you, and even who has the highest or lowest elevation.”

“Looking to the future, we’re happy to announce another new aspect to Personal Analytics for Facebook: Facebook Historical Analytics. By enabling this feature now (click the banner at the top of your report), we’ll start periodically collecting information to be able to show you an evolution of your Facebook profile over time.”