Ever since I got a phone as a kid and started texting a lot, I have been curious about the statistics of this activity, and for a long time, I wasn’t able to answer these questions. However, my texting habits progressively shifted from SMS to Facebook Messenger, to the point that I now use almost exclusively Facebook Messenger for texting. And one great thing about that, is that it makes it possible to download your whole texting history, and to do any kind of analyses you want on the data.

So when I had to chose any subject for a Dataviz project during the last year of my engineering school, I jumped on the occasion: with my partner we built a tool that makes it possible to know everything I ever wanted about my texting habits, and much more. We called it FBMessage Explorer, and the good news is, this tool is available for anyone to use. We tried to make it as accessible as possible: no need to write a single line of code, just point and click !

The first part of this article roughly explains the different features, and how to read the result, and then I drill down on my own messages to outline some of the insights I could extract for myself. However the idea is not to expose my texting life to the world, but more to do a demo of this tool and what you can get from it, so that in turn you use it with your own data. Last part is a detailed explanation of how to download and use your data, so please go ahead and try it for yourself !

Let’s have a look at what this all represents

When you first open the website, first thing you see is this weird looking screen with dots everywhere, curves on the bottom and left pane, and bar charts on the right.