Tweets Offer Perspective Of World Events

Twitter could turn a real-time barometer of what is going on during critical events, say US researchers

Engineers from Texas Rice University monitored tweets done during US National Football League games.

They could discuss it inside of seconds when touchdowns, interceptions and other tie in action happened.

Such a network could be used in a far-reaching operation of other scenarios, inclusive diplomatic debates together with during localised problems such as power cuts.

Professor Lin Zhong worked in conspiring with engineers from the Betaworks organisation of the Motorola Mobility Applied Research Centre to formulate his SportSense program that monitored and analysed tweets done during football matches in 2010.

"We chose football since touchdowns, interceptions and other events in the diversion result in a lot of fad and lead a lot of people to tweet," he said.

"We found that a clever hearing of the tweets could discuss it us what was going on in the game."

The program was able to record large events inside of 20 seconds of them happening, frequently before sports sites such as ESPN had concurred them.

It moreover monitored fad levels of fans. Citing more recent, 2011 analysis, a diversion between the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys was the many interesting of all games played during the initial week of October. It purebred 28 tweets per second on average.

Twitter sees massive traffic spikes when key sporting events are televised. During the 2010 Football World Cup it available upwards of 3,000 tweets per second. Tweets per notation can greaten by up to 50 times the normal amount during events such as the Oscars, the definite has said.

Mr Zhong mentioned that the investigate team wants to use the program to clarity other things that are going on in the world.

"Anything with a adequately large assembly has identical potential. Things that are televised, similar to reality shows and diplomatic debates, are of course possibilities," he said.

There were moreover more localised applications.

"When a charge hits and the power goes out in my neighbourhood, we would similar to to know when it comes back on - even if we come about to be at work. People twitter about the sort of events, so the vigilance is there in the data; it's only a matter of anticipating it," he said.

Harnessing the power of the network is as ample about people as it is about software, mentioned Mr Zhong.

"People do not frequently regard of themselves as being sensors, but any of us all the time senses and reacts to our environment.

"Thanks to amicable media sites similar to Twitter, it is right away probable to takeover the reactions - for millions of people - in actual time," he added.

It is not the initial time Twitter information has been harnessed for real-world applications.

In April, a study conducted by a PhD tyro at the Technical University of Munich found that investors subsequent to batch marketplace tweets could accomplish an median lapse rate of 15%.