Can Twitter predict the future?

 Can Twitter Predict the Future?

Article by Jewa Ian 

Twitter is an american social media company based in San Fransisco California. Twitter is a service for friends, family and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick and frequent messages. Now future being the period of time that will come after the present. We are trying to figure out how Twitter can tell us what the future holds for us.

Twitter Accurately Predicted a Politician’s Victory at New Hampshire Primary

This first one is the most recent example. Politician Mitt Romney won the Primary election of New Hampshire last week. The stunning part is that Globalpoint Research, did an in-depth sentiment analysis about Tweets related to the election. Twitter’s prediction beat every expert and national poll by much higher accuracy.  It is especially interesting what this means for the future of elections. What do you think of this? Is Twitter accurate enough to tell you who the next President is?

Twitter knows how you will be feeling this Friday

Here is another very interesting one for you. Scott Golder from The University of Cornell took a look at close to half a Billion Tweets. What researchers wanted to find out was the following: “How do our moods and feelings change throughout the day, week and year?”The interesting part here is that they analyzed messages from 2.4 million people in 84 different countries. This makes a lot of sense, as they could also compare different cultures, with different weekly routines and seasons next to each other.

Twitter actually predicted the revolution in Egypt?

When in the last year a massive revolution started to rise in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, Topsy labs asked themselves: Could we not have predicted all this based on the hashtags #yemen, #iran and #egypt from Tweets going around? Twitter played a major element in the revolution Topsy Labs did a correlation analysis of Tweets mentioned. What’s most interesting is that the graph strongly correlates with actual events marked on the timeline:

I am very curious which other events Twitter will be able to predict based on such analysis. Clearly it is Twitter where news is first broken. Personally, I am convinced there will be lots of other incredible use cases of how Twitter can help us in the future.