Just about every research, academic and professional organization with an interest in the data store that is Facebook has attempted to analyze, parse and interpret user patterns on the site. Now it is Facebook’s turn.

It recently examined how status updates are worded and what that word use says about the user. Following is what it found.

Younger people:

• Are more opt to express negative emotions such as anger as well as swear more.

• Talk about themselves and use such pronouns as "I" or "my" more often.

• Talk more about school.

Older people:

• Write longer updates.

• Gravitate towards standard English, using prepositions and articles.

• Talk about their families and other people.

Popular people:

• Use the pronoun "you" more as well as other second person pronouns.

• Write longer updates.

• Talk about sports and music.

• Stay away from talk about their families and are less emotional overall.

• Use fewer past tense verbs as well as words related to time.

Time of day:

• People tend to talk about what they are (or should be) doing at a particular time of day.

• People talk about sleep more at night, with such comments peaking at 4 am ET.

• Talk about work or school is higher in the morning.

• Comments about social or leisure activities increase as the day goes on.

Positive/negative words:

• People use positive emotional words more in the morning. As the day wears on the words become more negative.

• Status updates with positive emotional words receive more likes; those with negative emotional words receive less likes.

• Positive emotional updates receive fewer comments while negative emotional updates receive more comments.

Miscellaneous

• People tend to like a religious comment rather than comment on it.

• There is a positive correlation between how much a person uses certain words, and how much his or her friends do.

• Status updates that use more pronouns receive more of both types of feedback, as do longer status updates.

• The one word category that correlates most negatively with both likes and comments? Sleep.

About the Data

Facebook says it removed all identifiable information from the updates before it began its analysis. After that step, it calculated the percentage of words in status updates belonging to one of 68 categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary.

The categories were divided according to their part of speech (pronouns, articles, past-tense verbs, etc.), their emotional content (positive emotions, negative emotions, sadness, anger, etc.), or the topic they are related to (school, work, religion, etc).

It found for instance, that 22% of the words in the update below fall into the prepositions category ("to", "for", "since", and "in"), 11% into the past tense verbs category ("has" and "missed"), and 11% into the inclusive category ("in" and "this").

All together, about one million updates were analyzed.