I love it when the Interweb helps answer a persistent question like “how happy are we?”

It’s a serious question—evaluating the well-being of a place—and one that Sightline has spilled a lot of cyber-ink on over the years. France may soon embark on the largest national measurement of what has been dubbed “gross national happiness.” But now it turns out that the United States may already have a halfway decent measurement available—and it’s on Facebook of all places.

Check it out:

facebook gnh 2

No kidding, Facebook really does have something like a daily trend line for American happiness. (Be sure to play around with some of the features, especially the x-axis.) It’s far from a perfect measurement, to be sure, but it represents an aggregation of a huge amount of user-supplied data that must be the envy of social scientists everywhere.

And speaking of Facebook, you should get yourself over to Sightline’s Facebook page. That’s where all the cool kids are hanging out.