

Using Twitter as a Collective Mood Ring - mpellon
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/using-twitter-as-a-collective-mood-ring/?hp

======
socratees
Seriously, What statistics would you get when to take in to the fact that 90%
of the tweets are by bots? And twitter users with large following are either
bots or celebrities. All these factors should be considered while building the
web app. Anyways it should be an interesting social experiment.

Also, they should consider using facebook statuses instead of tweets. Facebook
status messages are more personal than tweets. Any thoughts?

~~~
mpellon
Facebook is being investigated as a potential data source as well especially
given the acquisition of FriendFeed and roll out of their new search engine.

I am of the researchers involved in the project (full disclosure) and yes we
are concerned about the numbers of tweets generated by "bots" or other
software although we estimated to be much lower ~25% (still significant mind
you). We receive approx. 1.8 million tweets a day but it is important to note
unlike similar projects we make no attempt to quantify the sentiment of
individual tweets and instead only say something about significantly large
portions of them (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) time frames.

Our method has proven useful on song lyrics, presidential speeches and blogs.
See our publication in the Journal of Happiness Studies
([http://www.springerlink.com/content/757723154j4w726k/?p=b9b0...](http://www.springerlink.com/content/757723154j4w726k/?p=b9b0726c4baa4c55a845dec88c63f4b4&pi=2))
for more info, open access license.

