It wasn't a great year, but Facebook's algorithms were smart enough to leave out most of the bad stuff -- and so was I. It picked events from June on -- which makes sense since the first half of the year really sucked ("The Year of Suck" as my wife would say.) 2016's about over -- "Another Trip Around the Sun," Facebook says, and good riddance, we say.
What Facebook thought was "important" were these items (in reality these are probably picked based on popularity & engagement):
- June 14th -- I give a tour of AccuWeather HQ to my brother-in-law and his wife
- June 24th -- I finally meet Reed Timmer in person at AccuWeather hQ
- July 30th -- I get a cat (I think the cat got short shrift, as this was a major milestone)*
- August 5th -- I spill Mountain Dew into my laptop (hilarity ensues, except in our IT department)
- August 27th -- I pose with a skeleton at Home Goods
- September 25th -- I go to Kristi's family reunion
- November 8th -- I vote in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (you know, the one where love lost?)
It does allow you to also edit these events, so I stuck in a second picture of the cat. Then I realized I had forgotten to create a "life event" that would probably have triggered additional shrift for said cat in the Facebook algorithms. Well, consider that problem fixed.
Facebook also sends me these additional statistics:
I became friends with 294 people this year, most notable of which are (I think) Jesus and Santa, indicated by the red arrows. A couple of buildings and a storm made it in there too!
Some of the people in this graphic, however, I have been friends with for even longer so it's possible this is also based on some sort of engagement algorithm. Facebook also summarized where I visited on this map. I checked into 144 places this year.
This map is very telling. Because of the hospitalization of our daughter, 100% of my travel in 2016 was related to her care -- I never left the state except for when she was in New Jersey. This was the first year I hadn't taken a Summer vacation since probably 2006, when I had just purchased a new house and dog and couldn't afford the trip or the time off.
And finally, Facebook Reactions -- the new emoticon buttons that launched this Spring. I clicked the "Like" button over 4,000 times, and 95% of my reactions were "Like" alone. No offense intended, it's just the easiest button to hit. I was most likely to be sad, and least likely to be angry.
I can tell you that most of those sads were for my friends pet's passing. Because I've been through that sort of thing too many times before (most recently in 2012), I make it a point to always "Sad" peoples posts when they've lost their pets, and post "Sorry to hear" in the comments, because it was important to me to hear those things when Star passed away.
