The BBC reports that Rice University researchers monitored tweets made during National Football League games. Through Twitter they could tell within seconds when key actions occurred. It could also be used in a wide range of other events, including politics and emergencies. For example, the BCC also reported that in April, a study conducted by a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich found that investors following stock market tweets could achieve an average return rate of 15%.
Professor Lin Zhong worked in collaboration with engineers from the Betaworks group of the Motorola Mobility Applied Research Center to conduct the research. They developed devise a SportSense software program which monitored and analyzed tweets made during football matches in 2010. The BBC quotes him, “"We chose football because touchdowns, interceptions and other events in the game cause a lot of excitement and lead a lot of people to tweet. We found that a careful examination of the tweets could tell us what was happening in the game."
Looking at Twitter with their monitoring software able to register big events within 20 seconds of them happening, often before sports sites such as ESPN had acknowledged them.
Twitter provides a fire hose of information. It was only after developing special monitoring software that the researchers were able to turn this information overload into a news aggregation system. There is another way to do this. You can set up a Darwin Awareness Engine ™Edition to monitor a topic of your choice. It looks at Twitter and many other sources to filter down the content to fit your interests. Then it visualizes the results in a way that allows you to spot emerging trends and see the relationships between these trends. Like the researchers we often see breaking news before it gets reported in the mainstream media since Darwin operates in real-time. Here is a description of how the Awareness Engine works.
You can also use Twortex, developed by our business partner Sequence Factory, that uses the technology behind the Awareness Engine to look at what is happening within Twitter.
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