Twitter is a gigantic repository for our collective state of mind. Every second, thousands of tweets reveal what everybody and their mother had for lunch, what Justin Bieber is up to, or what magnificent link you should be checking out right now. Individually, each tweet is mostly interesting to friends/fans of the tweeter, but taken together they add up to something more.
In analogy to individual neurons firing together to add up to the human consciousness, the billions of tweets have meaningful macro-states that contain information about the whole system rather than the individual tweeters. But we need to do a little data mining to extract meaningful information about these states, to expose our collective states of mind.
As a proof-of-concept we’ve1 been studying the mood2 of all of the public tweets. While there are many services that will allow you to study the mood of your own tweets (and also an neat little DIY project to show you the global average of twitter), much less effort has gone into studying how the mood breaks down according to geography. Below, I show a brand new video displaying the pulsating 24-hour twitter mood cycle of the United States (I’ll explain just what you’re looking at, in the following).
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/
Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now.
http://trendsmap.com/
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