WePredict

Using Twitter for macro-level analysis has been discussed on the blog before:
(i) Sample Selection, Twitter's Public Timeline, TweetScan and Quotably
(ii) Twilert (re-launched this month), Summize Labs, Twitter's acquisition of Summize
(iii) Life Analytics: Sentiment on the United States Economy
(iv) The Google-Index of Social Media, and the apparent superiority of Bing for deciphering real-time breaking trends

So it was interesting to read a recent article in the Irish Times about two students who used Twitter to predict that Joe McElderry would win the recent X-Factor competition... before the results were announced. "Ben McRedmond (17) and Patrick O’Doherty (16), two fifth years from Gonzaga College, Dublin demonstrated the power of their social networking analysis system, We Predict, at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. It was developed over more than five months and is based on storing and studying a growing database of 24.5 million tweets which hold clues about what people are thinking."

A quick search led me to the WePredict website. The information there states that: "WePredict is a showcase of several technologies we have built: a data mining application, capable of mining data from multiple social networks; and a complex suite of analysis tools for analyzing this data...WePredict's large database of over 22 million status updates growing at 20 a second makes it the largest user survey ever done... using the collective intelligence of the whole internet, a mere 1.5 billion people, we can predict the outcomes of elections, talent shows or who will be the christmas #1 and analyze the public reaction to new legislation or medical epidemics."

An exciting endeavour such as this one reminds me of Hal Varian's famous quote that "the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians." A two-minute YouTube clip of Google's Chief Economist is shown below, discussing this very issue.

The Sentiment on the US Economy from Twitter

The Analytic Bridge blog describes an exercise conducted by Life Analytics where 10000 tweets containing the word economy were collected with the purpose of finding out what people think and how they feel about the US Economy and the economic crisis. The exact details of the methodology don't seem to be documented, but the following are some results:

- US President tells that the economy gets better but people don't feel the same.

- Economy cannot be getting better while at the same time there are layoffs.

- People expressing very negative feelings after losing their jobs.