Does Facebook hold the clues about when couples are going to break up? That what CNN reports that journalist and Facebook analyst David McCandless says he can do by looking at the Facebook status updates of couples. In a presentation he recently made at the TED Conference, McCandless said that an analysis of status updates showed two major spikes in Facebook updates featuring phrases like “broken up” as taken from 10,000 different user profiles.
The first spike in breakups occurred in the period between Valentine’s Day and spring break. The second came in the weeks leading up to Christmas — McCandless speculated that people were making decisions to split as they were doing mental inventory of gifts to give. However, the day that was least likely to involve a break-up was Christmas, as McCandless said that this seemed just “too cruel” for most people.