Twitter is now for more than just tweeting. The researchers at Northeastern University in Boston are using millions of tweets from the popular social networking site and have created a Twitter Mood Map to measure the moods of the nation.
The researchers found that twitter users are happiest in the morning and in the evening, while their happiness peaks on Sunday morning and dips on Thursday night. However at mid-afternoon twitter users appeared most dull, shifting to better moods in the evening. Not surprisingly, people appeared happier on the weekends, with residents of California, Miami and southern states among the most content.
A colorful time-lapse video on the website Twittermood shows the happy moods pulsating from the US east coast to the west coast and back again.
The researchers have admitted that the findings are not terribly scientific. Twitter users tend to be techsavvy, live in large cities and are a fraction of the total population, but according to the results they 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 Sume Lehmann, one of the researchers.
Lehmann and others analyzed key words in some 300 million Twitter messages as happy or sad by using a psychological word-rating system. Then, based on the location of the messages and the general moods they suggest, they created maps which could be useful not only to collect public opinion but to mobilize users quickly, such as in a drive for emergency relief donations.
“The potential there is tremendous, on both an individual and societal level,” said Johan Bollen, a computer scientist at Indiana University not involved in the project. “It’s absolutely crucial to have real-time indicators about how the public feels, not in months, but in a matter of hours and days.”
