Twitter Tracks the Entire Country's Mood

[o00o]

Every tweet, no matter how trivial, reveals the writer's mood, through word choice--It can be as obvious as "happy" or as subtle as "diamond."

 

Now imagine if you could take that knowledge, scale it up to the entire Twitter-verse, and use it to gauge the entire country's mood? That's exactly what Alan Mislove, a computer scientist, at Northeastern University, did, using 300 million tweets in real time. Check it out in action, over time--you can actually see moods rising at the end of the work day, and that same pattern gets repeated across time zones:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujcrJZRSGkg

 

Though it seems impossibly hard, the methodology was actually quite straightforward. Mislove and his team started with a scale, previously devised by psychologists via polling, which assigns mood scores to 600 English words.

 

Mislove then used that scale to analyze 300 million tweets that originated in America, from 2006-2009. And he was then able to create a collective mood score for each state. (The reason the map above is so lumpy is that the area of each state corresponds to the number of tweets originating there.)

 

 

The only real barrier to tech like this from becoming leaps more subtle and profound is the word-scoring method. With a better, finer grained way to parse words and messages, you could easily imagine a tool that reveals emotional responses to events--and even uses that data to make market predictions. (And Twitter buzz actually turns out to be an uncanny predictor for how well a movie will do at the box office.)

 

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661966/infographic-of-the-day-twitter-tracks-the-entire-countrys-mood

[chenGOD]

Should be "Twitter tracks the mood of the entire population of people using twitter". I bet there are more people who don't use twitter than do. By a long shot.

[Guest Rotwang]

I've no idea what's going on in your avatar, o00o, but I'm pretty sure it's gross.

 

Cool post though.

[Zephyr_Nova]

Spooky.

[ghOsty]

Seems we're an angry bunch up here in MN whenever this was recorded... never gets happier than neutral, so much for "Minnesota nice"

[producer snafu]

Should be "Twitter tracks the mood of the entire population of people using twitter". I bet there are more people who don't use twitter than do. By a long shot.

 

 

this

[Zephyr_Nova]

If I used Twitter I'd be sad all the time.

[Guest happycase]

People keep too much stuff to themselves, you know? I bet peopel don't tweet their orgasms and whatnot. There should be some major spikes in there right around 11pm every night, cuz i am really happy around then every night.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

this is very cool. the trending on twitter is really interesting. i don't twit much myself but find looking at whats trending interesting.

 

i like that this gives mood to a word. although it could be cleverer and +/- mood points for consectutive words. some words mean totally different when used next to another word. maybe thats taken into account already

[Guest KY]

well it looks absolutely radical. too buggered to read or comprehend the infogfx though

[Dragon]

Why are Florida and California so insanely happy? Does it have something to do with Disneyland?

[chenGOD]

probably the fact that it's sunny a lot, and there are lots of girls in bikinis.

Also lots of weed in california and cocaine in florida.

 

I think a better mash-up is something like http://almost.at

Of course it can be used for fun and foolishness like the teen choice awards (wtf are those? Is that where they choose teen stars?) or comic con, but it can also be used for things like following developments at the world education conference or the moscow bombings...