Twitter is being used to track the flu

Twitter has entered the spotlight over the weekend due to Turkey’s ban on the service recently, but this time around, here is some news on Twitter that might help lighten your mood. I am referring the Twitter being analyzed by a software to figure out just how far a particular “season” of influenza has spread within a locality. There is a special project from Johns Hopkins University that intends to make use of online tweets to track the spread of influenza.

Twitter is a host to an unlimited amount of chit-chat, gossip, and poorly written sentences. While it can be hard to get a grasp on the overall picture of what the talk is all about, having access to all the tweets can be surprisingly handy if you have the computers and software to parse, process, and analyze all this information. Case in point is a project from Johns Hopkins University to track the spread of influenza from online tweets. Previously the team managed to track how influenza progressed on a national level, but the reality is that there are great regional and local differences in how the disease spreads.