• Boston Marathon bombings 'saddest' day in five years: Twitter data

    CREDIT: Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, hedonometer.org

    A five-year look at global happiness, courtesy of millions of English-language tweets.

    By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

    April 15, 2013, the date of the Boston Marathon bombings, was the saddest recorded day in five years, according to a measure of global happiness created by using Twitter data.

    As reflected by English-language users' posts, the date saw a leap in the use of negative words, such as "sad," "victims" and "tragedy," and a decline in positive phrases, such as "hahaha." The finding comes as researchers launch a new public website, hedonometer.org, that shows daily global mood swings as expressed via Twitter.

    "We're trying to develop a complementary measure of well-being for society," said Chris Danforth, a mathematician at the University of Vermont who developed the site along with his fellow University of Vermont mathematician Peter Dodds. Policymakers use gross domestic product, consumer confidence and polls to measure the happiness of large groups of people, Danforth told LiveScience. Twitter provides another, faster, way. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

    "We're trying to take advantage of people's expressions online and measure something that is really important," Danforth said.

    Mass moods
    The researchers use Twitter's Gardenhose feed to create their "hedonometer," which roughly translates to "happiness meter." This feed is a random sample of about 50 million tweets per day, which represents about a tenth of the messages posted on the site.

    The common words in these tweets have been previously rated as sad or happy on a scale of 1 to 9 in earlier experiments. Twitter users are only a fraction of the globe — about 15 percent of American adults use the service, Danforth said — but they are becoming both more common and more representative. As of December 2012, the social media site claimed more than 200 million active monthly users, and that group has become increasingly diverse as the site's popularity broadens, Danforth said.

    "It's becoming more and more reflective of what's going on for people," he said.

    Ups and downs
    What's going on turns out to be rather predictable, with a few major exceptions. People are sadder on Mondays and happier on weekends, Danforth and his colleagues have found. Napa, Calif., appears to be the happiest city (and no wonder, given all those wine-soaked tweeters passing through), while Beaumont, Texas, is the least happy.

    The hedonometer tool also lets researchers track happiness through time. Especially happy days tend to be predictable, Danforth said. People share their positive feelings on holidays, when they're off of work and with family.

    Unhappy days, though, happen in response to unexpected events.

    "We very rarely see a big uptick in happiness in response to some event that is unexpected," Danforth said. "Most of the downward ticks are unexpected events," such as the death of a celebrity or a natural disaster.

    Even the death of Osama bin Laden brought a swirl of negativity, likely because "a very negatively viewed character met a very negative end," the researchers write.

    The saddest day of them all was the date of the Boston Marathon bombings, with a happiness score of 5.88 on a scale of 1 to 9. But even though it had less-sad score, Dec. 14, 2012, the date of the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, may have actually been sadder, Danforth said.

    That's because the Newtown shooting happened on a Friday, a generally happy day when people otherwise would be tweeting positive vibes, he said. The Boston bombings happened on a Monday, when unrelated grouchy tweets about returning to work would have driven the average happiness down.

    So far, the hedonometer measures English-language tweets only, but Danforth and his colleagues are working to expand the number of languages as well as sources. They hope to add other online indicators, such as Google Trends. So far, however, the Twitter data alone has matched up well with more controlled measures of happiness such as Gallup polls, Danforth said.  

    Before the flood of Twitter and other social media data online, a tool like the hedonometer would have been available only to large corporations or the most well-funded of labs, said Scott Golder, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Cornell University and a staff sociologist for the data analytics company Context Relevant who was not involved in the research.  

    "Whether what this tool is measuring is actually personal or collective happiness is open to interpretation, but I think that this is a very interesting tool for visualizing the conversations that are taking place in public life," Golder told LiveScience.

    Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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  • Twitter will produce the name for humanity's furry little ancestor

    Rob? Nelson? Kate? Fred? What will this little guy be called?
    Credit: American Museum of Natural History

    By Nidhi Subbaraman

    In early February, scientists announced that they'd found our long-lost common ancestor: a tiny, furry creature with a tail that emerged after the dinosaurs disappeared. This ancient animal, about the size of a shrew or a rat, was the grand-mammal of all placentals that came after it. But because the scientists pieced together their knowledge of the animal from a deep stash of data rather than bones or fossils, they didn't get to give it a neat Latin name.

    "The reconstruction in the paper is very scientific, but it's an ancestor that we don't have a fossil of," Stony Brook University's Maureen O'Leary, one of the scientists who put its parts together, told NBC News. "We can tell what its anatomy looked like... [but] it's not something you can open a drawer and see." So scientists couldn't put a name on it. And what stuck was: "hypothetical common ancestor."

    If you think that's a mouthful, you're not alone. When the science-loving soundmasters at RadioLab first heard about the furry critter and its odd name, it struck them as distinctly ... unfuzzy. And O'Leary seemed to agree, RadioLab's Molly Webster writes. In fact, she joked, they may be able to do better.

    RadioLab jumped on it. They're teaming up with New York's American Museum of Natural History to let anyone help pick a name. You're invited to contribute to the naming contest by tweeting using the hashtag #nameyourancestor all the way until March 5. RadioLab and AMNH and a team of scientists will pick their favorites. Then, everyone gets to vote on their top choice from the final list. While "hypothetical common ancestor" won't be scrubbed from the scientific record, our ancient furry friend might wind up with a more endearing nickname.

    Some early entries include: Dwight Shrewte, Shrewquille O'Neal, Tooth-billed ratypus, Katherine, Steve, and Paw. Ready, set, tweet! And share your suggestions in the comments below. 

    Via The Atlantic, RadioLab

  • Research shows you'll want to tweet this post

    As Twitter becomes a dominant news source for millions of people, a new formula can predict a news story's popularity on the microblogging service.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    This is a blog post about the sexy social media technology Twitter. It mentions Justin Bieber. You'll want to tweet it. At least, my editors hope you do. My job might depend on it. 

    The Internet and social media have altered the face of journalism. Few media companies can survive selling ads in traditional newspapers and magazines that readers will see as they flip pages in search of content that tickles their fancy. 

    Online, which is where most of us get our news today, millions of readers click links on Twitter to go straight to the content they want. That means the specific article must sell the ad. In turn, the dollar (or cent) value of a story is measured in the eyeballs it attracts.

    Thus, in order for a media outlet to make a buck in this new world of journalism, editors and journalists must fine tune their story selection and writing style to maximize its spread on Twitter. Social media researchers at Hewlett Packard have developed an algorithm that does just that.

    "In principle, there is a formula, an algorithm, that you can apply to any news story you write [to maximize your exposure] on social media," Bernardo Huberman, a senior fellow and director of the social computing lab at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., told me Wednesday.

    The formula is a mixture of three main characteristics: its source, subject matter and the popularity of the people mentioned. It predicts how many tweets a story will get with 84 percent accuracy.

    Huberman and his team created the formula after examining data on story content from the news aggregator Feedzilla during a week in August 2011 and studying how these stories spread on Twitter. Interestingly, they note, the level of subjectivity in an article isn't a big factor in its popularity.

    The most popular stories are those published by technology news sites, about gadgets and social media, and include gossip about well-known celebrities. By this reasoning, a scandal involving an iPhone and Justin Bieber posted on Mashable would do exceptionally well.

    The bias toward technology-related stories and sources, Huberman notes, may be because people who use Twitter "are very, very keen on technology."

    Overall, the formula matches what editors and journalists already intuitively know: Sex and scandals sell, especially scandals that involve somebody with name recognition. What surprised Huberman was the degree to which all of this is predictable by a computer.

    This predictability could lead to a software program loaded on journalists' computers that examines every story they write and tells them how well it will perform on Twitter. It could also recommend ways to improve a story's Twitter score.

    One of the concerns is that "if everyone starts using this algorithm, all news stories will start looking the same," Huberman said. Even more troubling is "stories that might be important but don't have these characteristics will drown. No one will notice them. That's sad."

    But it is also possible that journalists can use the formula to jazz up a story that would likely drown by highlighting or incorporating elements known to make it a Twitter success. 

    An argument can be made that the role of journalism isn't about success on social media. Huberman, for one, agrees with that sentiment. But he is interested in what he calls social attention — how to get people to pay attention to whatever you want them to pay attention to.

    "The success of a story, whatever the story is, depends on being attended to by people to read it and pass it on," he said. "You can have the most incredible thing in life, a story, or something to buy or sell, but if nobody notices it, you might not be able to do anything with it."

    Findings are to be published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. A pre-print is available from arXiv.org.

    More stories on Twitter:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

    For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    To improve results for voice search, Google compiles huge databases of speech samples, so that computers can learn the language for themselves — and understand you're asking for.

     

  • Ashton Kutcher, friends key to Twitter's success

    Christine Daniloff

    The rise of the microblogging site Twitter was fueled by media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity, a new study says.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Developers of the next-big social networking application stand a greater chance at skyrocketing success if Hollywood stars and big media go gaga over it, according to an analysis of Twitter's meteoric rise in popularity.

    Data collected on the number of users adopting the microblogging service in its early years (between 2006 and 2009) show that it first spread gradually via traditional social networks — real-world friends, work colleagues, neighbors — then took off when media stars started to gather their flocks.

     

    "The first big run up in the number of Twitter users corresponded to the months that Ashton Kutcher was trying to be the first one to a million followers," Jameson Lawrence Toole, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-author of the study, told me today.

     

     

    The Hollywood actor, who is most recently in the news for his recent divorce with actress Demi Moore and starring role in the hit TV series Two and a Half Men, touted his Twitter flock on Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show. And that's also when Oprah herself sent her first tweet.

    "The most number of people ever signed up for Twitter during that week," Toole said.

    A visualization showing the adopting of Twitter across the United States. From late March 2006 through the early August 2009, nearly 3.5 million people signed up for twitter. 2.3 million of those users signed up in the 408 cities displayed here.

    From there, Twitter's rise was unstoppable. News reporters wrote about Kutcher and Oprah and more people signed up for Twitter. More media personalities wrote their own stories about sending 140-character tweets. More people signed up. More stories, more users.

    While the data isn't all that surprising, it suggests a new way for researchers to model the power of media influence in their analyses of what drives a company to success, according to Toole.

    In traditional models, he said, the role of media is considered a constant across time. What the Twitter analysis illustrates is the existence of a feedback loop present in today's media. "The more people sign up, the more news articles are written, and then more people sign up," he said.

    The effect has been named elsewhere as the Oprah Effect, which is particularly prevalent in book sales. Aspiring authors know that if the talk show host picks their book for her monthly book club, for example, a spot on the best seller list is almost certainly in their future.

    The comedian Stephan Colbert has a similar effect, known as the Colbert Bump, which is particularly effective for politicians, according to Toole.

    Given the analysis of Twitter data from its early years, the power of big media stars seems to apply to Internet-based applications as well. So, if you want millions of users to use your app, make sure a big name pitches it, preferably in a quasi-viral way. That should mean success, according to the new model.

    "What we can't model is if Oprah is going to pick up your Web service," Toole noted. 

    More stories on Twitter and the power of media:

    The study is scheduled to appear this month in the journal PLoS One.

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

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