Thanks to social media we now know when users are feeling happy, sad, hungover, and even arriving late for work.
How? By looking for certain words and phrases in all the tweets in the Twittersphere, from 2013.
Data editor for Twitter, Simon Rogers, perused through millions of tweets in order to interpret the network's overall mood at a given time.
Rogers explained his process in a blog post saying: "Looking at the usage of different words and phrases in 2013 by day of the week and month tells you a lot about how the world tweets. We turned that data set into a ratio of Tweets containing those words in English per million posted."
The results are very, very interesting.
When are people "feeling happy?" Users were feeling happy in unusually large numbers on Fridays and Saturdays in March. Personally, I am happy every Friday. Who isn't? They were also happy on Tuesdays in December and January, which seems strange, but it also happens that Christmas and New Year's Eve fell on a Tuesday last year.
When are people "feeling sad?" It's no surprise that the month of December is the "saddest" of the year. I guess seasonal depression is real? Living in Rochester, NY, I think that we can all agree with that.
When are people "hungover?" People tend to tweet about their morning misery and these results are no surprise. The biggest days seem to be Tuesdays and Wednesdays in January, which New Year's can play a role in. Also Thursdays and Fridays in November, which Thanksgiving festivities can account for.
And when are people "late for work?" The Summer. The nice weather of June, July, and August seems to make people take their time in the morning.
I definitely think it is cool that all of these results can be extracted from so much data. But I wonder if Twitter can use this power to find out something more useful? I mean I'm sure we are all dying to know when everyone is sad, hungover, and late for work. What else is Twitter for?
Find the original BuzzFeed article here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-knows-when-youre-going-to-be-sad-hungover-and-late-f
Interesting that even without the use of hashtags, Twitter tracks what we're saying on a large scale. I agree that the site should look at more useful ways of analyzing their data!
ReplyDeleteI find this information very interesting. It is amazing to me what technology, especially social media is capable of now. While I do agree with you that this information is somewhat useless, I would like to see Twitter use this technology for research and possibly studies.
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