[tyrmored]

That's a pretty curious and probably flawed metric to choose. Surely it would be better to find the actual "is no longer in a relationship" updates?

Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually include those two phrases? I call bullshit.

[ewjordan]

Is it possible they really meant "over 10,000 status updates" that include one of the phrases in question? Broken down yearly, 10,000 samples is an average of somewhere around 25 samples a day, and I'd imagine that on average far less than 1/25 of Facebook status updates are about breakups, so there would be only a handful of days with any hits, let alone enough to pick out a "Monday effect" or anything like that.

If it's 10,000 that match the query, then that's a more reasonable amount of data. Of course, the interpretation is still pretty shallow, and mere regex-matching for those phrases could be getting a lot of other crap, but at least it's a (just barely, given that they want to break it down day-by-day) decent sample size.

[achompas]

I've been on Twitter for about 20 months and tweeted 1000 times.

Using that ratio (50 updates/month), we can estimate that their 10,000 status updates cover 16 people over a year.

My first instinct was "why not?" but thinking about this more, that looks kind of thin. Of course, I'm assuming a lot of things away...

[chronomex]

It sounds to me like the 10,000 "status updates" include only status updates containing the keywords, probably from the Facebook search function.