Moldova

Twitter now used to measure moods! (amazing Video)

August 01, 2010

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By Stela Roman

Computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues have created a Twitter Mood Map to measure the moods of the nation using using almost 300 millions Twitter messages, or tweets, from the popular social networking site. The team calls their work the "pulse of the nation".
"The visualisations are amazing and I think it is absolutely fascinating to see the nation's mood vary in near-real time," says Johan Bollen of Indiana University in Bloomington, who was not involved in the work but who is one of several other researchers using Twitter as a tool to track the public mood.
The researchers discovered that people are happiest in the morning and in the evening, with happiness peaking on Sunday morning and dipping Thursday night. It appears that Twitter users were in the worst mood at mid-afternoon, shifting to better moods in the evening.
The researchers think that the results have potential as a tool for providing real-time analysis of critical issues.
"Even though individual tweets are pointless to anyone besides your followers, in aggregate there is a lot of meaningful information that can be an instrument to see how people feel about things, whether it's public reaction to a politician's speech or a consumer attitudes about a brand," said Sune Lehmann, one of the researchers.