Twitter is fast becoming the real-time zeitgeist of the web hive mind. (Sorry, I don't know what that means either.) Anyway, I've been playing around with Twist, which tracks trends on Twitter and graphs the results. Two of the most interesting trends I've found are:
drunk, hangover - The drunk talk spikes on Friday and Saturday nights, followed by hangover talk on the following mornings. There's a similar correlation on Facebook.
monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday - This one is really interesting. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday get many more mentions than the three other days of the week, which shows the importance of the weekend in contemporary society. Wednesday is the low point, which turns the graph into a representation of hump day, only inverted.
Any other interesting trends that you've noticed?
Update: My wife reminds me that Plodt is tracking explicit Twitter trends...you can create personal or collective graphs by assigning values to words like so: *mood 8* or *weather 5*. Here's a good example of a collective poll about how the candidates did during the debate at Hofstra.
There are 28 reader comments
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:46PM
It looks like you can only look back a month, whereas facebook lets you go back a whole year. The biggest spike of the year for "hungover" is of course on New Years Day. Look for tweets with "slutty" to increase to their apex one week from today. I posted some more: here
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:47PM
what no one discusses is the incredibly small sample of people actually using twitter. I'm on the more tech saavy end of the spectrum in my little world, and most people i know have never even heard of twitter. Twitter seems to me like a small group asserting themselves as a big group. And tweet analysis strikes me first and foremost, as irrelevant.
...of course people talk about being drunk on friday night.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:48PM
(breakfast,lunch,dinner) is an interesting one. People always tweet more about dinner. But during the week, they tweet about lunch as much as dinner, and during the weekend they tweet about lunch less but tweet about breakfast as often.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:55PM
People talk about getting drunk on Friday and Saturday nights? wow, that IS interesting.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:55PM
SNL on Saturdays of course and how unfunny people find it. It annoys me and makes me curios to what they actually find humorous.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:56PM
Looks like soup took over ice cream as the seasons have changed.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:56PM
mccain,obama for last month - debate spikes. for last week, they fairly well match, with a nice curvy daily shape.
• Oct 24 2008 • 3:58PM
"cool" is hotter than "hot"
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:01PM
It appears that more people are watching -- or at least tweeting -- about TV than books. Good to know the Twitter-using community is not so different from America in their preferred past times.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:01PM
Interesting correlations in frequency/timing to be found in pooping and peeing.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:17PM
Anytime I have a creative idea or make an observation and wonder, "could I be the only one who has thought of that?" 90% of the time a Twitter search reveals that I am not. I love the stream of consciousness that is the Twitter.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:19PM
On Oct. 23, one of the top trends was #TTL, for TwitterTasteLive.com. It's a site where we taste wine and compare notes on Twitter. We hung out with winemaker Jed Steele. If you join the site, mention my name in the "How did you find out about TTL?" field.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:21PM
Twitter itself is more popular than sex.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:22PM
Love vs. hate. Love is on the uptrend and much higher than hate. Good for us.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:22PM
Only 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and their are already 204 drunks. Must be college kids. Damn kids! Flibbidy flube.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:24PM
More or less. A self-descriptive graph?
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:41PM
East Coast vs West Coast. About even, actually...no bias there.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:46PM
Bored vs. Busy reveals that boredom strikes on the weekends.
• Oct 24 2008 • 4:57PM
Do Death vs. Taxes. Despite the upcoming election and the dire financial state of the world, people seem to talk about death about twice as much as taxes.
• Oct 24 2008 • 6:07PM
A lovely dance is done between football and church. Looks like church wins.
• Oct 24 2008 • 7:20PM
Unsuprisingly, people start saying sorry after midnight, 'sorry' & 'drunk' also show a recognisable correlation.
• Oct 24 2008 • 7:38PM
Transportation: Bus/Train have an inverse relationship with Car: here
• Oct 25 2008 • 12:25AM
People have breakfast on the weekends, and lunch on weekdays, but coffee everyday.
And here's some things I do on the weekend (apparently others agree).
• Oct 25 2008 • 8:52AM
Unsurprisingly, coffee and meeting are corellated.
• Oct 25 2008 • 6:44PM
meeting and fun
• Oct 26 2008 • 11:30AM
For those new to Twitter or outside the core group of users, I've been attempting to provide some context and/or additional information for the top trending terms on Twitter:
• Oct 27 2008 • 6:05AM
There's a whole bunch of fun analytic tools for Twitter. I think Twitter Spectrums gives a wider image of what's actually being discussed, and I used a bunch in my analysis of 'Win' and 'Fail'.
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
JohnG. • Oct 24 2008 • 3:39PM
there's a perfect correlation in (sex, drunk).