Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

This is either useful or terrifying, depending on how the data affect you: Researchers at Facebook and Cornell University have figured out a formula that predicts whether a couple is likely to break up within the next 60 days.

Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell, and Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook, took a dataset of 1.3 million Facebook users who listed that they were in a relationship. They were actually looking for a formula that could predict which users were in relationships with each other.

They found that the shape, or “dispersion”, of your friends network is the key. You might expect that a cluster of mutual friends indicates two people are in a relationship but the opposite is the case: You’re more likely to have cluster of mutual coworkers listing each other as friends than a couple...

When a group of teenagers says Facebook "confuses and scares" them and makes their eyes hurt, there may be a problem. Though Facebook is still considered the most popular social network among teens, their enthusiasm seems to be waning.

Some of them blame it on the ads and the games, but they also say it's become too popular with their parents.A recent Pew Research Center report found that 77 percent of online teens are still on Facebook compared with 24 percent on Twitter, but the latter number is up 16 percent since 2011....