Mining Facebook Status Updates – Search and Trends

I was checking out tweetmeme today and I thought it was pretty clever. Twitter is its own community with its own dynamics, but I have lately been itching for a service that would help me get value out of the status updates that my friends are constantly posting. I just came back from a trip to Sundance where I know a chunk of my friends were in town – their status messages told me so at some point. But it was tedious to plow through the history of all of their status messages and figure out who was in town then. I’m guessing anyone with a large number of friends on Facebook has probably seen a status update go by that they thought was funny or otherwise wanted to recall at some point.

It would be cool to have a simple service that did two things for my friends’ status updates:

Status Update Keyword Cloud – Just like a tag cloud, display the most common words / themes found in my friends’ status messages in the last few days. Like any good tag cloud, I’d be able to click on the keyword and see whose status messages reference that keyword. It would be a cool way to visualize what your friends are talking about or referencing via their status messages.

Search – I’d like a keyword search tool that would let me search my friends’ status updates for key terms or keywords that I’d like to find. This would be helpful as a simple way to figure out which of my friends might know something about a given keyword or topic.