Twist – Fascinating Data Mining

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Noticed a newish service called Twist that does for Twitter what Trends does for Google. Type in a term, and Twist shows a graph of how much and when people are tweeting about it. This is an interesting way to mine data to gain insight into people’s lives. I plugged in some words and found out some hot data.

1. Dinner – Peaks everyday at the same time. Most people tweet about dinner on Saturday.
2. Lunch – Same pattern as Dinner, but at mid-day.
3. Gym – Most people go to the gym in the early evening during the week (with Mon and Tues being the heaviest days). Friday and Sunday are the lightest Gym days. On Saturday, people go to the Gym more at mid-day.
4. Beer – Peaks in the evening, but is low on Monday and Tuesday. Then slowly ramps up Wednesday and Thursday until the massive peak on Friday. Typical.
5. Wine – Follows a similar Beer trend, but it’s highest peaks are on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Wine drinkers are different from beer drinkers.

Is aggregating data like this to better understand ourselves worthwhile? Interesting? Useful? I know it gave me a couple chin-scratchers today.