Social Networks Becoming Less Funny

If I had to guess, I think I would be considered a typical facebook user. I visit it probably once a day to see if anything neat happened, thanks to the news feed feature that everyone bitched about when it was first introduced. What did facebook look like before that? Everyone complains about every change they make but I think in about a month’s time, you forget what you used to be attached to. It’s change—get over it. (Especially if you’re an Obama supporter. I hear he’s full of it.)

I’m sure facebook has the actual statistics but probably keeps it under lock-and-key. I’m sure they notice that when I make a new friend, I’ll spend an extra 5-10 clicks to go through that person’s profile and pictures. Anyhow, It’s always nice when a company makes their data available, albeit in a restricted way. I just discovered facebook lexicon, the google trends for facebook walls. I instinctively did what any typical person would do when presented with a textfield. I typed in:

lol

It took a second to interpret exactly what the results meant and even then, I was so surprised that I had to add more query terms to verify. But there, right in front of me, in graph format, was evidence that social networks are becoming less funny. While the rest of the internet seems to remain steady, people on facebook are simply not laughing together as much as they used to in 2007.

I can see two possible reasons for this decline, neither of which are acceptable:

1. there is a new way of laughing that is not lol, rofl, or haha
2. people are laughing else where (i.e. in real life)

I suppose there is another possibility though I can’t test it because I cannot search for regexes. If I could, I would look for l(ol)+ or (ha)+ and an abundance of those would make all the difference to me.