Measuring Real Time Public Opinion With Twitter

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through Twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."

Comments

Won't work for long

[jonbryce]

Wait until the astroturfers and lobyists discover this.

Re:Won't work for long

[Frosty Piss]

Wait until the astroturfers and lobyists discover this

They already have. But it's irrelevent, Twitter has or is near peaking. As soon as "the next big thing" hits the scene, Twitter will fade, like ICQ and all the rest of the chat "communities".

sample selection bias

[drDugan]

"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now"
=>
"Twitter is a reflection of what the twits are twatting in right now"

Can you see the problem?

"public" opinion?

[AliasMarlowe]

Or the collected opinions of twits, er twitterers, twats, or whatever. It's a self-selected group, whose collective opinions are no more representative of the general public (or voters or any other subset of the general public) than, say, the opinions of slashdotters. And although there is much drivel on slashdot, I suspect it is nothing compared to the twaddle on twitter.

Re:"public" opinion?

[freedomlinux]

Is anyone else thinking "selection bias"?

How can Twitter users be a representative sample of the public as a whole? And I don't even want to think about issues with geographical context...

Rigged sample

[gmuslera]

Assuming that "normal" people behaves and think about subjects like the average high activity twitter user in all cases is a somewhat a risky choice, throwing dices could be more exact.

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

People who use twitter and read tweets should be gathered in a room and be shot.

Not representative?

[clarkkent09]

Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now

Correction: Twitter is a reflection of what morons are interested in right now. Still, useful marketing information.