Microeconomic data in social networks and information systems

In the talk I will discuss about the new sources of formal and informal microeconomic data in social networks, and information systems. Microblogging platforms like Twitter has been used to get an indirect estimation of unemenployment rate while data from yahoo query logs have proven to be directly correlated with stock markets movements. Here I will present the amazing detail of microeconomic data present in Facebook and how these data can be eventually used to create powerful "fine grain" proxies of macroeconomic indexes. Finally I will summarize other sources of proxies of economic topics such as Youtube/Freebase and Google Trends / Google N-grams and I will discuss about the potentiality/differences of each system.