Twitter Mood: The Pulse of the Nation

By: Dan Farber
Topics: In The News

Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day, as inferred from Twitter

(Credit: Alan Mislove, Sune Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, J. Niels Rosenquist)

More than 65 million brief Twitter messages pass through cyberspace per day. Researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities have come up to visually represent the mood of the nation based on millions of "tweets."

"Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day," appears to confirm conventional wisdom. The findings, visualized on a U.S. map, showed that early morning and late evening have the highest levels of happiness. The West coast is consistently three hours behind the East coast in reaching the happiness zone. In addition, as would expected, weekends were scored happier than weekdays, with Sunday morning as the high and Thursday evenings as the low score. Apparently, work days are not the happiest time in the lives of Twitter users, and by inference the larger population.

The researchers analyzed over 300 million tweets collected between September 2006 and August 2009 to determine the mood of America over a 24-hour, 7-day period, and by geolocation. The mood of each tweet was inferred via Affective Norms for English Words, a word-rating system that gives normative emotional ratings for English language words.

The video below shows the shifting mood, or pulse, over time:

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by winkio August 13, 2010 6:16 AM EDT: Awesome how twitter can be such a good source of information! The social experiment Winkio.com aims at taking the pulse of the world pretty much in the same kind of way, although it will really make sense as the community grows; Reply to this comment