Messenger Data Analysis

Go to Facebook and click on the small down arrow in the top right, near the notification icon. Go into settings.

On the left panel, go into "Your Facebook Information" and click "Download Your Information".

On this page, make sure you have date range as "All of my data" and the format as "JSON". If you download your data as HTML, the analysis will not work. For media quality, low is recommended to reduce file size.

For Messenger Analysis, you only need to select "Messages", but you can download everything if you wish (the file can get quite big if you download it all).

Facebook will take a few minutes to process your information before you can download the file - you will get a notification when it is ready.

Once it has downloaded, extract the files. On Windows, right click and select "Extract All". On a Mac just double click the file and it will extract to the same folder it is in.

Now you are ready to start the analysis!

If you are running on Windows 7, you might have trouble viewing emojis, and they might appear as a box rather than the emoji itself. This is because Windows 7 does not come with the Segoe UI Emoji font that Windows 10 comes with. It is a font created and trademarked by Microsoft and released with Windows devices. However, if you simply take that font from the Windows 10 "Fonts" folder, you can install it on Windows 7 and get the Emojis to display. However, they will only be displayed in black and white, not full colour.

Click here to download the Segeo UI Emoji font

If you do not wish to download the font, you can view your Emojis in a table that uses images of the emojis rather than an Emoji font. I would use the images in the table too, except the Google Charts API does not allow for images to be placed as the labels for charts, so it needs to be a font.

Click here to show the table that uses images in place of the default table.

Emoji icons supplied by EmojiOne

This web application runs completely on Javascript, which runs in the Browser. Javascript is used to add things such as interactivity to websites, and pretty much every site now uses some form of Javascript.

When you load this web page, you download the Javascript files that will be able to analyse your file. Then, when you select a file to analyse, you don't actually upload it anywhere, you just tell your web browser where it is on your computer.

If you wanted, you could even turn off your internet connection before you select your file, and the application will still work!

Then when you click start, the browser reads that file and uses the Javascript to analyse it. Your data stays safe on your own computer!