The Twindex
I personally never use my twitter account, but so many people do that now there are 1.8 million tweets every six minutes. With so many tweets going by twitter has become a huge source of information, and the company is always looking at new ways to utilize this monstrous pile of data. With the election coming up people have begun tweeting more and more about the candidates, and weather the comments are positive or negative, twitter stores the information, and now the company has developed a way to compare how many positive and negative comments in total are being made, and what the ratio is of positive to negative. Twitter looks at all of the comments made about Obama and Romney, and runs a sentiment analysis on them. The data is then put into a score that represents how positive or negative comments were overall for each candidate, and that score is called a Twindex. This information has proven to accurately predict changes in polls, and has been proven to show changes faster than polling data. One of the examples given in the article is that during the Arizona primaries, tweets about Rick Santorum were going down, while Mitt Romeney’s tweets continued to soar and become even more positive. Journalists could have known the results of the election simply by watching this ‘Twindex’, and we will probably see the media start to report on the changes in candidates ‘Twindex’ in the future.
A candidate’s Twindex score represents the sum of all of the positive or negative feelings about that candidate within the American network. I would be most interested to find out how similar people’s feelings are about a candidate compared to their close friends. I would think that the closer two people are, the more likely they are to share similar views on a candidate, and the more one person tweets about their feelings on a candidate, the more likely the second person is to tweet their own feelings. These similarities in tweet behaviors would be more prevalent in closer friendships than in distant ones because closer friendships are more likely to agree on different issues.
-Thomas