A global mood ring called Twitter. Twitter predicts the future? A recent study [pdf] by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A.
Huberman at HP Labs found that it's possible to use Twitter chatter to predict first-weekend box office revenues simply based on volume of tweets. The predictions were even more accurate when they introduced sentiment analysis (i.e. classified tweets as positive or negative). The above chart shows predicted revenue on the first weekend versus actual. The blue line is the tweet predictor, and the green line is predictions from Hollywood Stock Exchange, a site where people can put down fake money in predicting box office revenues. Hollywood Stock Exchange Is Becoming A Real Money Exchange In April. Seriously. I’m a bit of a movie fanatic.
As such, back in the day one of my favorite websites was Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). On it, you bought and sold both movies (moviestocks) and movie stars (starbonds) based on how you thought they would do with upcoming releases. Of course, all of this was done with virtual cash (H bucks), making it a fun game. Text Analysis and Word Counts. LIWC: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.