Twitter moods
July 21, 2010 11:46 AM   Subscribe

 
So the country overall appears to be happiest according to twitterings between 5 and 7 in the morning. Proof once again that I don't understand twitter peoples.
posted by Babblesort at 11:50 AM on July 21, 2010 [2 favorites]


"with a significantly happier west coast that is consistently three hours behind the east coast."

Yes, well, fucking time zones, how do they work?
posted by chavenet at 11:50 AM on July 21, 2010 [21 favorites]


The twitter people are up early in the morning, like those infernal birds which tweet near my window. They're happy because I have, once again, forgotten to poison their feed.
posted by adipocere at 11:53 AM on July 21, 2010 [7 favorites]


Clearly these people don't understand east coast psychology. We're not happy unless we're ranting about how much we hate everyone.
posted by Mister_A at 11:53 AM on July 21, 2010 [5 favorites]


Wow. Twitterers in Florida are apparently always happy or close to it. Who knew?
posted by saulgoodman at 11:54 AM on July 21, 2010


I'd like to see this corrected for morning vs evening people. Like, select the "day window" for each user (by examining their history, obvs) and then figure out, by user, when they are happy. Plot them all together.

Otherwise you have morning people happy in the morning (and uncorrected by evening people who are still asleep) and evening people happy in the evening (and uncorrected by morning people who have gone to sleep). In between, nobody is happy *and* they are doubled up.
posted by DU at 11:55 AM on July 21, 2010


Damn, NY is angrier than I remember.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:55 AM on July 21, 2010


The need to include all the hatred expressed by the non-Twitter using world every time Twitter is brought up in conversation.
posted by bondcliff at 11:55 AM on July 21, 2010 [4 favorites]


"with a significantly happier west coast that is consistently three hours behind the east coast."

I love the ambiguity of that sentence. It's like, "I don't beat my wife because I love her." So, does that mean that the west coast is happier than the east coast, significantly? Or is it just as happy, later? OR, are these two separate observations, in a fun little mash-up of obviousness?
posted by iamkimiam at 11:55 AM on July 21, 2010 [2 favorites]


The = They.

Guh.
posted by bondcliff at 11:56 AM on July 21, 2010


OR, are these two separate observations, in a fun little mash-up of obviousness?

I was confused as well, but the graph reveals it is this option. Although only half of it is obvious, IMO.
posted by DU at 11:57 AM on July 21, 2010


Pretty interesting actually. Judging from the line graphs the east coast is a tad more manic depressive (higher peaks, lower lows).
posted by samsara at 11:57 AM on July 21, 2010


If by "manic depressive" you mean awesome, I'm right there with you.
posted by Mister_A at 11:59 AM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


It appears that Maine is completely miserable at all times other than early morning.
posted by Babblesort at 12:00 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


#JameGumb #BuffaloBill
Well this sucks she just wont put the lotion in teh basket WTF Imma turn you into lapels
posted by Mister_A at 12:03 PM on July 21, 2010


Yay for America.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 12:04 PM on July 21, 2010


Why is Indiana so depressed, relative to the rest of the Midwest? It's like an angry little red thumb.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:06 PM on July 21, 2010


leotrotsky, if you've ever been to Indiana, you wouldn't have to ask that.

sorry, former Ohioan, couldn't resist...
posted by lonefrontranger at 12:09 PM on July 21, 2010 [4 favorites]


They filtered them to find tweets that contain words included in a psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words – a low-scoring word on ANEW is considered negative, a high-scoring one positive.

Could this have anything to do with the number of obscenities people throw around? 'Cause that might explain the New York 'anger,' anyway.
posted by angrycat at 12:19 PM on July 21, 2010


former Ohioan

This broke my head because part of it keeps trying to make Ohio fit inside Indiana.
posted by Babblesort at 12:19 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


That blip in the middle of Kansas today was me, reacting to my co-worker spending the morning playing farmville and listening to rush limbaugh on headphones while I took 90% of the day's calls. All caps, no survivors.
posted by hellojed at 12:21 PM on July 21, 2010 [6 favorites]


Looks like my state of New Mexico, though surrounded by pulses of varying emotion, remains decidedly pissed off all the time.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 12:24 PM on July 21, 2010


Maybe the early morning skew is from Twitterers waking up and the first thing they tweet is "Good Morning!" I have a bunch of friends who do this but very few who also consistently say "good night".
posted by morganannie at 12:26 PM on July 21, 2010


Your winsomeness must be in high demand in NM, Parker...
posted by Mister_A at 12:27 PM on July 21, 2010


The East Coast: now with 33% more GRAR!
posted by .kobayashi. at 12:28 PM on July 21, 2010 [3 favorites]


Why does tweeting demonstrate happiness?

Even though I agree that when birds do it they seem joyful . . .
posted by bearwife at 12:31 PM on July 21, 2010


I wonder if there are cultural considerations in play here, like people down south are more likely to use a specific expression that 'registers' as happiness according to this algorithm when they're happy, whereas people in the northeast are less likely to actually mention it when they're feeling good, or less likely to use a phrase that registers.

It's an interesting experiment but I don't think the data is all useful per. se.
posted by delmoi at 12:32 PM on July 21, 2010


Who knew America was a cat with a giant anal prolapse.
posted by fire&wings at 12:33 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


"The mood of each tweet was inferred using ANEW word list"...

So.... is "fucking" a negative or positive word?

I wasn't able to locate the current ANEW list, but I found the list they started this project with with .

Please note that while "fucking" is NOT on the list, "banana" is... make of it what you will.

Note as well that the lead researcher seems to be "Alan Mislove". I would be led to believe that this unfortunate mashup of a last name could result in some misguided sense of the positive and negative meanings of words.

banana
posted by HuronBob at 12:33 PM on July 21, 2010 [3 favorites]


Everyone seems to become happy around happy hour. The green dot in CA at 8:15 am is me drinking my breakfast martini.
posted by special-k at 12:38 PM on July 21, 2010 [2 favorites]


The 40 page wordlist was linked directly from the New Scientist article.
Here it is (PDF)
posted by vacapinta at 12:39 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm still trying to make sense of whatever the hell is going on in Virginia, particularly at midnight, when it get's a weird red stripe running through it.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:42 PM on July 21, 2010


I favor morganannie's theory about "Good Morning"
The word "good" is high on the happy list but it is not always used in a happy context. Did they take into account a word's appearance in a negation or a compound, such as "not good" or "good enough" or "good God!"?
posted by vacapinta at 12:42 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Mood Matters (I read it and found it great)
posted by stbalbach at 12:43 PM on July 21, 2010


Interesting to me that both Kentucky and Idaho seem to be outliers (look at 3am). Two beautiful states, but it seems odd.

It seems that this map is an average of readings from 8/2006 to 9/2009. It would be very interesting to see the map by season, i.e. do people in Michigan and Wisconsin get more pissed off from September to May (winter)?
posted by mrgrimm at 12:47 PM on July 21, 2010


Looks like somebody's not getting enough ketchup.
posted by JohnFredra at 12:50 PM on July 21, 2010


east coast psychology. We're not happy unless we're ranting about how much we hate everyone.

There's not a question of being irritated, only how irritated to be.
posted by stbalbach at 12:53 PM on July 21, 2010


do people in Michigan and Wisconsin get more pissed off from September to May (winter)?

Depends on how they would interpret this: "SNOW DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
posted by morganannie at 1:03 PM on July 21, 2010


Oregon does not like being awake at one a.m.
posted by VelveteenBabbitt at 1:13 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Wow, looks like no one is happy in the afternoon.
posted by lullaby at 1:20 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Holly shit. Twitter metrics about Iowa just collided with Meredith Willson.
posted by Muddler at 1:27 PM on July 21, 2010


So what time of day is MetaFilter happiest? Because I'll gladly stay away the rest of the day. Cortex, to the infodump!
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:29 PM on July 21, 2010


Wow. Twitterers in Florida are apparently always happy or close to it. Who knew?

Simple explanation: easy access to cocaine and sunny beaches!
posted by ericb at 1:34 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Also to address this sentence again, "...a significantly happier west coast, that is consistently three hours behind the east coast.."

You know, some days it's only an hour behind, and then there are those bad days it ends up behind Hawaii.
posted by zizzle at 1:35 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


California girls they're undeniable.
posted by banished at 2:03 PM on July 21, 2010


I think the conclusion is obvious, and nicely fits my preconceptions: morning people are twits.
posted by Malor at 2:08 PM on July 21, 2010


why would they assume that NYCers foaming at the mouth with rage is synonymous to unhappiness? WE FUCKING LOVE TO RANT!
posted by liza at 2:17 PM on July 21, 2010


I would like to present this as evidence that weekdays are soulsucking. We should set the clock permanently to Sunday, 1PM. We should abolish Thursday afternoons. All those in favor?
posted by not_on_display at 2:46 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Who knew America was a cat with a giant anal prolapse.

I thought the cartogram looked like roadkill chicken.

Vaguely appropriate? You decide.
posted by Splunge at 2:59 PM on July 21, 2010


Very cool. They describe their method for determining sentiment in this study: From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series. They use simple frequency counts of affective words in a tweet. There are a few problems with this. One which they point out is that Twitter messages are not representative of normal written English. Second, they don't do any part of speech tagging, syntactic or semantic parsing, so things like sarcasm, negation and the like are not caught. "I am not happy" would be a positive tweet to their system.

Still, it's an interesting project, and probably representative of the true sentiment of users. Washington state is happier than I expected.
posted by formless at 3:05 PM on July 21, 2010


Godamnit, I've been collecting data to do just this kind of thing for the last year! They beat me to it!

Well, almost the same thing. I've been calculating the dong:butt and shit:fuck ratio every 10 minutes. Results soon!
posted by Jimbob at 3:23 PM on July 21, 2010



It appears that Maine is completely miserable at all times other than early morning.


that's before all the massholes cross the border each morning.
posted by machaus at 3:38 PM on July 21, 2010


We should abolish Thursday afternoons. All those in favor?

Aye.
posted by epersonae at 5:10 PM on July 21, 2010


Missouri never seems to get happier than about "middling."
posted by limeonaire at 5:11 PM on July 21, 2010


According to this graph I am happiest when I am sleeping.
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 6:15 PM on July 21, 2010


Where's Alaska? Hawaii? We're part of the US too, dammit.
posted by rhapsodie at 7:41 PM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]


Looks like SkyNet has coopted USA Today.
posted by Dr. Grue at 8:12 AM on July 22, 2010


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