Newest Twitter Feature: Predicting the Future
You know, Twitter can do a lot of things: it tells you what the world is thinking and, similarly, lets you tell the world what’s on your mind. But now you can add a new feature to that list: predicting the future. At least, that’s the word out of HP’s The Social Computing Lab in Palo Alto. After studying the relationship between tweets and box-office revenue for movies, they discovered that Twitter was a better predictor of success for a film that standard industry research tools. Just as fascinating as the results are how they were obtained: the team used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which employs…