Ithaca, NY

To find out how the rest of the country, or even the rest of the world, is feeling, check Twitter posts. That, in essence, was the finding of a two-year study by the Cornell University of 500 million tweets from 84 nations.

The general trends showed that workers worldwide are happy when they wake up, but their mood change once they start to do their jobs. The good mood returns again at the end of the day when people come back home, go out with friends and enjoy some entertainment.

Global and national outlooks also tend to be better on weekends and when the sun is up.

The study is considered a pioneering work in using the Internet to study human behavior as more people sign up for membership in social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

These social networking portals provide a good window into people's minds and hearts because of their interactive feature since members are free to post their thoughts and feelings. It moves away from the initial passive use of the Internet when people just surfed websites and read what was written by others.

Tthe number of people using the social networking sites are expected to double to 1.85 billion by 2015, studies showed.

Facebook has about 750 million members and has breached the 1 trillion mark in terms of hits. Twitter counts more than 100 million members.

Scott Golder, lead author of the study, said that while tweets may appear to be mundane and inconsequential, these posts are massive archives of digital traces because it records everything that happens in life.

Among the indicators of happy mood at the start of the day are the frequent use of the words "awesome," "super" and "fantastic" in tweets, while the mid-day posts would see the words "panic" and "fear" used more frequently.

Another study of social networking sites made in July by the Ponemon Institute found that American workers spent 62 minutes daily using social networking sites for personal reasons, but they only spent 37 minutes on it for business use.

A Harvard University sociologist compared the new social science being built on technology to the period during the 17th century when the telescope and microscope were discovered.

 

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