Slashdot Mirror
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."
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.