Is Twitter the best measure of people's happiness?

The New York Times' Jenna Wortham writes in today's Bits blog post that two University of Vermont statisticians are using Twitter to gauge that emotion.

"The goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones Industrial Average," Wortham writes.

The Twitter index can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time," one of the statisticians, Peter Sheridan Dodds, told Wortham.

Dodds says tracking and analyzing public writings on the Internet could provide better results than some surveys and polls because answers are usually unfiltered and more genuine, Wortham writes.

"With their research on Twitter, Mr. Dodds argues, he and (Christopher M.) Danforth will be able to analyze reactions and emotional responses to current events by the hour."

The duo is analyzing about 1,000 tweets a minute - more than 1.4 million a day.

What have they found so far?

About what you'd expect:
"Twitterers with more followers tend to be happier, and the number of positive tweets spikes around weekends (when words like ‘party' are especially common)," Wortham writes. "The mood drops during the week, coinciding with the rise of words such as ‘office.'"

Thoughts?

Andréa Maria Cecil is Managing Editor at the Central Penn Business Journal. She is a 31-year-old native New Orleanian who is obsessed with how gadgets and technology can make you more efficient.