The always-interesting R blogger and political scientist Drew Conway — and self-styled luckiest man on earth — just announced some very happy news: he just got engaged to his future wife! Congratulations, Drew! (Drew proposed the traditional way, on a lovely European vacation. But if he’d just held off a couple of days he could have proposed via towel-clad adonis, instead.)

Always the analyst, Drew did manage to capture some metrics on the impact of the engagement: the rate of posts to his fiancée’s facebook wall after she changed her relationship status to “Engaged” (click to enlarge):

Drew used the Facebook API to capture the data, R to create a kernel smooth of the post rate segmented by male and female friends, and the ggplot2 package to chart the results. Looks like the women are quicker to respond, but the men keep up the posts longer. (Which reminds me: I still have some Christmas cards to write around here somewhere…)  

And the chart makes for a lovely design for a wedding invitation, too! 

Zero Intelligence Agents: Anatomy of a Life-Milestone Announcement on Facebook