I would do what Facebook does and analyze everywhere a user goes on the web, on or offsite. But with Twitter, I would run some kind of statistical analysis on the data, so that you can see what data the person exposes themselves to, from what sources, and then look at the links and data they post in their Twitter stream. From many people’s trails and their social networks mapped out, you would be able to run some kind of epidemiological meme-tracking system.
Like how Google supposedly knows now better than the CDC when there is a flu outbreak in a particular locality. Using such a massive data set as what everybody in a city, a particular block, a neighborhood or a country is essentially thinking about, or at least focusing their expressive and research energies on.
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2 Comments
And that’s why open-source + API = awesome.
With such robust tools out there for accessing everyone’s data though feeds and remotely, you don’t have to wait to Twitter to do this. There are plenty of programs out there that can patch into niche groupings or keywords on Twitter/Facebook/Wordpress/etc and output relevant data. All you have to do is that that one step further and focus on a user.
Yeah but this is an idea I will never follow through on, regardless of whether the tools exist to pull it off. Creating your own custom application to track this sort of thing seems like the best strategic avenue to me as well. I’d like to encourage other people to take this idea and run with it in any direction possible. Make a ton of money, be my guest!