A wedding and a funeral

I began thinking about the Facebook graph.  While, like Tony,  I am disappointed in what they gave us, I have realized there is some useful information.  In this case I am looking at the month of May.  Here we had the royal wedding and the death of Osama. While its not clear, because of the way of the data is presented, I think we can infer some key elements of memes.

1. These two memes are the only ones overlapping in 2011. 
2. The marriage begins to spike before Osama's death 
3. The royal marriage ends its spike just as Osama's death is reported
4. So we can possibly be seeing one meme stealing the audience of another.  

This theft is important because it shows how one meme spikes at the expense of other conversations.  But until we get data with more fidelity we can only infer that Osama's death stoled audience away from the royal wedding.

The other thing we should take notice of is the type of memes the spikes represented.  They all seemed to be call to celebrate, mourn or pay attention to something.  They evoke an emotional response to share.  

Finally a bit about natural level of conversation.  While we can not see the day to day changes in the conversations we do know they exist both from observation but also from the data.  As Tony pointed out Facebook broke the data into 4 subgroups and each group came with top ten stories.  This gives us 40 stories that did not spike, so we can infer a level that has to be less than Irene spike that stays pretty stable since it can absorb 40+ events without spiking.