[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.