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As we fully enter the holiday season, most of us are busy thinking about our annual festivities: attending parties, decorating the Christmas tree, wrapping presents, surviving family gatherings, etc. The last thing that crosses most of our minds is worrying about our personal relationships during the “most wonderful time of the year.”  But, according to graphic designers David McCandless and Lee Byron, going into the holiday season may be a time where we should be worried about our relationships after all.  The two conducted research that focused on understanding the times of year people (mainly Facebook users) were presumably going to break up.

McCandless and Byron searched over 10,000 Facebook status updates that contained terms related to breaking up, and they found some interesting results.   For example, the fewest splits seemed to happen on Christmas Day, but the weeks leading up to Christmas were one of two strongest peaks that happen every year.  Spring was another time for relationships to fizzle out, as some people may have kept the spring-cleaning going from their closets and into their love life.

Photo Credit: bestweekever.tv

Using social media marketing, McCandless and Byron also looked at the reasons why people on Facebook break up and the means by which they end their relationships. As for why, “Non-Approval” (from parents and friends) seemed to be the least popular reason for breaking up, “Distance,” “Cheating,” and “Lost Interest” filled out the middle, and “Other/Complicated” was the most common reason for Facebook users to go their separate ways.

McCandless and Byron listed the ways in which users went about calling it quits, and split the category into two parts: “Those born before 1975” and “Those born after 1984.”  With the first group, the most common way of breaking up was “In Person” at 74% with “Phone” at 16%, “Email” at 4% and “Facebook” at 4% trailing behind and “Instant Messaging” rounding out the bottom at 3%.  With the second group, breaking up “In Person” was still the most popular at 47% with “Phone” following closely behind at 30%, and “Email” at 4% and “Facebook” at 5%.  What differentiates these two groups the most (aside from more people in the second group using the phone to take care of business) is that 14% of those born after 1984 find “Instant Messaging” their significant other a perfectly acceptable way of kicking them to the curb. Ouch.

What can we learn from all of this?  Well, for whatever the reason (and no matter what season), Facebook break ups are bound to happen.   Chances are, those who have the decency (and courage) to pick up the phone to say goodbye probably had more of a meaningful relationship than those willing to throw in the towel with a text.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather hear someone’s voice than be over a text saying, “We r over!  C U l8r!”

For more on this topic, check out the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Break-Ups: ‘Tis the Season”

After Facebook created the Friendship Pages option that allows users to see every interaction two people have had together on the site it was hard to imagine that the site would be able to create another way to track what your friends are doing but Facebook has done it again. This time the site has created a feature that allows users to see what topics their friends are talking about and then combines them onto your News Feed.

Facebook says that ‘the feature looks for certain phrases in the text of feed stories and combines them into one story if it finds matches. It’s currently being tested with a very small percentage of people.”

The feature works by creating a post on a users News Feed that shows which friends mentioned the same topic, links to that topics Facebook page, and then shows the continued conversation.

Photo Credit: Mashable

So what does this mean for Facebook? Is it something people are going to be interested in or does it just add more to the creepiness factor of knowing everything your friends are doing, saying, thinking, etc.?

Check out “Facebook ‘Mentions’ Feature Shows What Friends Are Talking About”

This week a new Firefox plug-in that allows drunken social media users to monitor their actions on sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, and G-mail was released. All a user has to do is download the plug-in and create settings that will allow their drunken posts to never make it on the Internet. Users will have to set their hours of intoxication and if they try to log onto their social media sites they will be asked to pass a sobriety test before they are allowed access. The test asks the users to complete what should be a simple task of typing the alphabet backwards, but that’s sometimes even hard to do sober.

The plug-in is not available for mobile phone applications though, so when a person is out drinking at the bar they can update their Facebook status and send out as many e-mails as they want, whether they’d like to or not.

Visit Mashable’s “Don’t Drink and Facebook: New Plugin Mitigates the Fallout”

Photo Credit: Zazzle