Facebook released a new tool yesterday, called Facebook Lexicon, that creates a graph representing the number of times certain words have been posted on people’s walls. If you type in, as they suggest on the page, the words “party tonight” and “hangover”, a cool little graph comes up showing when these words were used the most.

There are certain limitations of course. Words allowed for submission have to be single- or two-word phrases, use alphanumeric characters and there can only be 5 in total. The measurements also don’t seem to be quantified, so it’s useful for comparing words to each other but not for comparing one graph to another. Facebook also made a point of saying that no human will read people’s walls, so that this tool doesn’t invade people’s privacy.

A few bloggers have compared it to Google Trends, saying that it has much less functionality. I see the tool as being useful for measuring buzz and useful for PR (although only on a large scale). While it doesn’t give you an exceptional amount of information, it will provide some perspective on the popularity of relative terms, and reflect issues that are floating around, equating to free market research.

(As an aside I compared the terms Cape Town, Johannesburg and JHB. Cape Town was quite popular, with JHB coming in second and Johannesburg not even showing up on the graph. Lexicon could then perhaps even be used as a way to study language and slang, showing us how language is actually being used or slang is developing.)