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Number of likes of Mitt Romney on Facebook decreasing constantly (private.woutervdb.com)
10 points by bashzor 4966 days ago
7 comments
ppetty 4966 days ago
Is that surprising? I'd imagine the loser in every state's gubernatorial race is also trending down on Facebook. McCain? All washed up on Facebook, too, right?
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ojiikun 4965 days ago
I don't think it's surprising, but to watch the actual data change in real-time is fascinating. We're entering the era of real-time, fine-grained, high-scale opinon metrics like never before.
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meatsock 4965 days ago
so create two index "funds", "avg number of likes of people who just lost an election" and "avg number of likes of GOP" and see if the former post-loss delta is more or less than the overall delta of the latter. i suspect that recently losing an election has a greater effect.
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ojiikun 4966 days ago
I actually love the idea of this tool in general. Would be neat to open it up where you can just paste in the URL of any FB page and get the counter/deltas!

I'd also suggest adding a cumulative delta counter, rather than just the delta per poll. That way I can load up the page and come back an hour later and get an even better feel for the changes. Maybe also add a rate (delta/hour) field?

Awesome work!

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woutervdb 4965 days ago
Thanks! Glad to hear! Tonight (or at least the past couple of hours) was very stressful because the site was posted on HackerNews. You see, I'm hosting it on a Raspberry Pi so I had to work really hard to get the thing running smooth again...

Also, thanks for the suggestions! I may implement them sooner or later, I've got a lot of other projects to do...

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captn3m0 4965 days ago
http://www.edgekick.com/fb/mittromney shows some pretty graphs for the decay.
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pella 4965 days ago
at the moment:

Likes for Obama : 33.203.746

http://private.woutervdb.com/obama/

Likes for Romney : 12.053.114

http://private.woutervdb.com/romney/

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woutervdb 4966 days ago
Server is getting hotter and hotter, internet connection is getting slower and slower...
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PanMan 4966 days ago
Why are you going via your server? Couldn't you have the JS get the data from Facebook's Graph API directly?
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dpritchett 4965 days ago
Yep, this page handled entirely client-side, with some analytics JS on top for good measure:

    setInterval(
      function() {
        $.getJSON(
          "https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney",
          function(results) {
            console.log("Mitt Romney Like Count: " + results.likes)})},
      5000)
Edit: Love the idea, glad the page is out there! Great conversation starter.
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bashzor 4965 days ago
Haven't tried it, but isn't that blocked by Javascript's cross-domain protection?
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woutervdb 4965 days ago
jQuery fixes that.
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woutervdb 4965 days ago
I wasn't expecting this much traffic, so I didn't really care about server performance because it was irrelevant. I only posted it to my Facebook and Twitter, and now it has around 25 likes, I've been twittered by a guy with 4K followers and someone appears to have bloggd me. It's awesome, but very hard to keep it online. I may implement client-side JS in the near future. Thanks for the suggestions!
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kentbrew 4965 days ago
Here, this won't hurt the Internet as much: http://kentbrewster.com/who-likes-mitt/
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bashzor 4966 days ago
See also http://private.woutervdb.com/obama/
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