Facebook's Lexicon was, until very recently, a secret goldmine for Facebook ad developers. But now all you will see is a sign that the Lexicon has been removed from Facebook "for the time being".
While this is aggravating to those who had gotten into the habit of using it for market research, it may signal good news for internet marketers. Why?
Well, Facebook is apparently going to focus development on their "analytics tools for Page owners, advertisers and Platform developers".
This means they are perfectly savvy to the uses people were putting Lexicon to. And that it might be brought back as a more tightly-focused commercial version for marketers.
What was the Lexicon, anyway? (You ask, out of idle curiosity.)
It was a short-lived tool, launched in October 2009, which used to track the number of occurrences of Facebook wall "words and phrases". Think "long-tailed keywords" for phrases, and you'll see why marketers found it so exciting.
In other words, it measured the buzz...
..And the mood - its "Gross National Happiness Tracking Index" measured words on Facebook walls to see if people used positive or negative keywords daily. It's similar to a tool created years ago that did the same thing, right across the net. (There was even a television program about this type of internet sociometric recently, in which the show's producers attempted to "prove" that the words we collectively use mean that Nostradamus' apocalyptic prophecies are coming true).
But we are getting distracted and beginning to veer off topic: Something we Facebook users do a lot, particularly when just browsing. To return to our main point...
Alas. Facebook apparently got wise to Lexicon's money-making potential, and realized they had a Wonder Tool in the making - one they can no doubt monetize and make income from (as good business people should). Or else perhaps they had received forceful letters from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lawyers about plagiarism. We'll never know.
Farewell, Lexicon. Facebook has hinted they will bring back "some components" in an unspecified future... but in what form will we see this once-handy tool?
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