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Data Mining Reveals How Wording Influences Tweet Propagation
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most widely shared tweets in history is Obama's "Four more years", posted after his second presidential election victory and currently retweeted 775,000 times. But how would different wording have influenced this tweet's popularity and the way it spread? It's easy to imagine that there's no way of telling what might have been in such an alternative universe. But a surprising phenomenon on Twitter has allowed data scientists to study this kind of alternative reality and work out the factors that make one tweet more popular than another. It turns out that the twitter stream contains a surprisingly large number of tweets from the same authors, pointing to the same content but with different messages. That's a natural experiment in which factors such as the author, the URL, the number of followers and so on are all held constant while the message varies. By studying these pairs of tweets, researchers can measure how well each performs and then determine which factors contribute to their popularity. These turn out to be things like the amount of information the tweet contains, the language it uses and even whether it includes a request for a retweet. The team has developed an algorithm that predicts which of a pair of tweets is more likely to be successful with greater accuracy than humans. And they've even set up a website where anybody can test their tweet-rating ability and thereby improve their chances of writing the perfect tweet."
Someone comes along and claims to have the perfect formula for writing a book, or a song, or music.
They distill it down to its dreary essence, optimize based on what the focus groups say, and then produce utter dreck.
Some of the best movies, books, and songs would NOT have passed through these design by committee things. And many more which do pass through these things should have never seen the light of day.
Every time I see one of these things I think "OK, we'll see everything done like this for a while, people will hate it, and they'll move onto something else".
If this shit worked, there wouldn't be huge Hollywood films which fall on their face because nobody is interested. All it really does it make lowest common denominator stuff which nobody actually likes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Four years, more please"
"assert(sqrt(16));"
"remember when i killed an american in yemen because i can?"
"Guantanamo...why does that sound familiar"
"If uncle Joe says OK i guess gays are maybe kinda ok."
"I swear to god if i hear benghazi one more time..."
"I can haz budget?"
Good people go to bed earlier.
As a Social Media Strategy consultant, this information is very useful to me. I will study it closely.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Apparently, I am in a minority in that I do not reflexively favor excessive use of capital letters and exclamation marks. I also tend to pick the ones that get to the point (I had not realized it was possible to ramble when limited to 140 characters), which also makes me unpopular.
This tells me that my very low opinion of Twits was still based on an excess of optimism, I am correcting that error in my judgment.
The twitter stream
a frog tumblr
the sound of retweets
to tweet to perfect tweet.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
The "compare two tweets" functionality is broken.
Submitting the form leads to a 403 Forbidden error.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Click on the ad to see the trick they don't want you to know about...
Their are formulas for successful books, music, and if you hear the shit they play on radio, or go out and read romance novels, or any genre it is all predictable. I really have no idea what your talking about? Those standards or formulas have been in place for years, how many books have been rejected from publishers, how many bands have been rejected by labels, how many big production studios turned down a script, all because they didn't fit their formula. That includes idiotic censorship, 'this books content is something we cannot allow, change it', the same with music and scripts.
All of those which could have been popular, and sometimes go on to be infamous, because there are others out that support and will give those works a chance to be judged, usually by the same mindless twits aka general public, which will also reject it because it doesn't fit the status quo. And it isn't until years later that those works go on to be considered vital pieces.
Basically, a famous person can write anything and it will be retweeted. An unknown person can write the same tweet and it will be ignored.
Link to paper:
Sasa Petrovic, Miles Osborne and Victor Lavrenko. RT to win! Predicting Message Propagation in Twitter. ICWSM, Barcelona, Spain. July 2011. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/...
Fuck Tweets.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Who remembers Nixon's supporters chanting "Four more years" at the 1972 Republican Convention (no, I wasn't there)...