Rewinding Twitter

Google announced today that it is giving the ability for us to go back in time and see Twitter trends. One challenge that remains (at least as far as I could make out) is that these trend indices are not downloadable yet. Perhaps, some old fashioned eyballing and coding into low, medium, high type categorical variable might be a crude but effective way to capture this information. It should be helpful for those of you wondering what the buzz was for a movie three months ago...Let me know.

Measuring Twitter Counts to Gauge Attention

Some students have been asking about how to quantify the attention something (say an artist such as Taio Cruz) is receiving on Twitter. Fortunately, there are some third part applications that work of the global Twitter feed and can give us good proxies. One such website is http://www.twitterstats.net. Type in a keyword such as a name of an artist and it will give you the number of Tweets in the last 24 hours that contain that keyword. Also gives hourly trends but thats probably too fine a level of granularity for our class project. The total number of tweets should serve as a good predictor, especially going by the HP project cited earlier in this blog.

What other uses can you put this to?