Researchers Trail Twitter to Track the World’s Mood Swings
Did you tweet today? Hop on
Facebook to see what your friends were up to (or stalk them)? Check out the up-and-coming Google+?
With the explosion of social networking websites and services like these comes the possibility of tracking the world simultaneously on a personal level. A team of researchers from Cornell University took advantage of this tremendous opportunity by measuring the attitudes of over 2.4 million people in 84 countries using Twitter over the course of two years.
"Tweet, tweet"Twitter is an online social network service that enables its users to post micro blogs, or "tweets" of 140 characters or less. Users can "follow" other people and get instant updates each time they tweet, as well as gain a following of their own. Created in 2006, Twitter now has over 2 million users and handles over 1.4 billion tweets per day.
The results of the project were published in the online journal
Science. The findings conclude that work, sleep and amount of daylight all affect emotions like delight, distress, fear, anger and alertness. Researchers had previously suspected this, but couldn't be...
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