Facebook has released a “happiness index” based on the status updates people make on their site. They have an algorithm that looks for words connected with positive and negative feelings, and categorize the status updates accordingly.

The GNH as it’s called, the Gross National Happiness index, currently only looks at status updates from US Facebook users, which makes sense since it’s a language-based study tool. (Hopefully Facebook will soon add similar indices for other countries as well.)

When you study the graphs that Facebook generates, a weekly pattern quickly becomes obvious. Unsurprisingly we’re at our happiest during public holidays and on Fridays and weekends, but a closer look at the graphs reveals what we’ve suspected for a long time:

People hate Mondays with a vengeance. (Garfield was right!)

Just look at these graphs.

Happiness level:

As you can see, the overall level of happiness bottoms out every Monday.

The low level of happiness on Mondays isn’t just caused by a lack of positivity. If we look at the negativity alone, it becomes clear that people are in a really negative mood on Mondays.

Negativity level:

People really do pick themselves up during the weekends, though, and we’re a lot happier on Fridays as well (anticipating the weekend, we presume?).

Positivity level:

We bet you can guess on which weekdays those drops in positivity take place…

This “happiness index” clearly shows Facebook’s data mining potential. Considering its huge user base and active users, there are tons upon tons of data available, and the question is how Facebook will be using it. We’d love to see more of these “indices”. As long as the data is of a general nature there shouldn’t be any privacy concerns, so we’re all for this kind of information being made available.

Additional information about the GNH index can be found over at the Facebook blog. (Check it out, it’s an interesting read.)

Data source: All graphs are from Facebook’s United States Gross National Happiness page, with those elegant arrows added by us.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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