Last week on April 15, Facebook announced Lexicon, a tool which lets you graph the use of words throughout all of the Facebook walls (it would be nicer if it was only within your friends, as an option).

As Facebook describes it:

Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

It’s definitely a cool gadget to play around with.  Search to your heart’s content and maybe you’ll come across some amusing things.  I searched for “hiv” and there was a massive spike mid-March, uh oh!

Here’s a screenshot of a more tame search that’s a good example of what exactly you can see:

Link to Facebook Lexicon

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