IBM’s social monitoring and analytics tool Congos Consumer Insight, in it’s own rights, is a powerful enterprise tool, and now although I prefer to use something like a SproutSocial for my analytics, I still recognize the effort that went into bringing us a ‘Congos’ in the first place. Today, that group behind the research put into understanding algorithms based on public Tweets, have released other interesting and quirky facts they came across, when building the data set research for Congos Consumer Insight.
8 Crazy things IBM researches have learned while studying Twitter:
- 10 tweets per second mention Starbucks
- Lady Gaga’s popularity is “super-linear” meaning she gains followers faster than Twitter adds new accounts. She has more than 18 million followers.
- IBM can predict wait times at airports by crowdsourcing information from tweets. They search tweets for mentions of airports, then send an @reply to the tweeters and ask them to reply with wait times.
- Your tweets give away where you’re from. Scientists can tell with amazing accuracy whether you’re from the West, East, Midwest, or South, just by the words you use in your tweets.
- Because of its 140 character limit and use of abbreviations, Twitter-speak is like its own language complete with swear words
- People are more inclined to Tweet something negative than positive.
- No one leaked that Watson won Jeopardy, even though the show was witnessed live by dozens of IBMers and others, and aired weeks after it was taped.
- Every public tweet since Twitter’s inception in March 2006 will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. IBM plans to map every archived tweet to Wikipedia, and tag it with sentiment, to make them more digestible.
