InauguRate09: The Tweeple’s Balls

There were so many Tweets flying over D.C. for the past few days it’s surprising the Air Force didn’t scramble the F-15s to secure the air space. I won’t try to aggregate all the aggregations of Inaugural Tweets here. But this project caught my eye:

The InauguRate09 widget [note to lawyers: copyright that one for 2012!] was created by Thummit, a D.C. based ratings-and-recommendation service currently in beta.

It harvested Tweets about various inaugural events and did basic semantic analysis–parsing the language to determine whether a Tweet describing that event rated it a “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” or something in between. It tallied the data and came up with the rankings above.

I suppose it’s not much of a surprise that the We Are One concert on the mall ranked higher than the Mid-Atlantic Ball ["So nice to see you, Madame State Senator!"].

But if the Thummit data can be trusted, Google’s hullabaloo was more fun than Al Gore’s Green fling–and both were rated higher than the high-gloss soiree thrown by perpetually reluctant interviewee Arianna Huffington.

This is all fun stuff, and a good window into how the Twitter ecosystem is being used by third-party developers to tell lots of different stories. Thummit allows users to rate local restaurants via mobile devices and the web, but it is working on other projects like this that parse other public commentary into yea/nay evaluations.

Just to check Thummit’s analytic work, I dug into the Tweetstream to check out that bottom-ranking “official” Youth Ball. It didn’t take much semantic analysis on my part to verify which way the thumbs were indeed pointed:

lol youth ball.what a joke. from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:40:36Z

Youth Ball FAIL. I got yelled at by cops and wasn’t allowed to see obama or kanye. Ditto for about 1000 others who paid $75 for tix. from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:28:51Z

youth ball, huh? is there a not quite middle age ball? from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:08:15Z