Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Predicts Box Office Results
netjockey2 writes "In a study published by HP entitled 'Predicting the future with Social Media,' researchers Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman 'demonstrate how the content of social networks can be used to predict events in the real world.' In particular, they say they are 'using threads from Twitter.com to predict box office revenues of films.'"
We saw it last week.
FP
Too bad we can't use Twitter to predict Slashdot dupes.
Seeing people posting about what they're doing does not predict what they are doing, it documents it. This is just another attempt at justifying all the wasted electrons used for this social media sh!t.
BTW, after seeing all the posts online about how many people hate the iPad even before it came out should have predicted it wouldn't sell at all - even though it seems to have sold pretty well so far. I guess their theory didn't predict that their theory failed. Oh wait, now that I've posted this it does predict it.
You just rediscovered statistics and polls.
Duping is one thing, but did you even glance at TFA? It's a rambling, anonymous, incoherent post on a forum, containing no links or any real information about the topic. An actual sentence:
"An analysis of trade chirp not only to know the fuss about a movie, but public sentiment vis-à-vis a production before its release and after that the audience saw it."
Gee, spamming Twitter about a movie results in herds of sheep trampling a path to the box office? Yawn.
If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what does your empty desk signify?
...until Hollywood learns how to game Twitter. Should be any minute now...
Every time that I read Slashdot, I see a comment linking to some xkcd comic. Every time I've clicked those links, I've been horribly disappointed. xkcd is just not funny.
Dilbert, now that's a funny comic. Calvin & Hobbes is another funny comic. They are witty and intelligent. They bring genuine laughter, and even make you think a little bit about their message.
xkcd, on the other hand, typically just makes an obscure Internet- or geek-culture reference, and idiots somehow find it "funny".
Do us a favor, and don't link to xkcd. Find a relevant Dilbert comic instead.
(I'm sure that some xkcd fanatics will start replying to this with xkcd links. Don't bother, I'm not going to look at your replies.)
Anyone remember when snakes on a plane got a massive budget increase due to all the talk about it on the internet then pulled in very little at the box office.
shades of John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider"...
If you die on twitter, do you die in real life?
I'm sure some Gecko-type has already thought of this, and is trying it in a secret lab somewhere. Then again, if I was an investment banker, I'd be immensely greedy and paranoid and never tweet about any company I was interested in.
What the hell is that?
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
what happened to ang lee's hulk, to the point where the movie corp wanted all mobile phones banned from showings of said movie, for fear that negative options relayed by sms where affecting box office returns.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Did it predict that Uma Thurman's "Motherhood" would pull in a whopping £88 ($130) with 12 paid tickets in its first weekend of release in the UK?
http://www.cinematical.com/2010/03/26/uma-thurmans-motherhood-opens-to-88-in-uk-thats-131-00/
Isn't this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga