A study by two
researchers from HP Laboratories , in Silicon Valley, reveals that
the popular social network Twitter allows you to know in real time the public’s interest in films and can
help predict which box office will make a film production on the weekend of its premiere. The computing method developed by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, which analyzes what is said on the microblogging platform and will be presented next August during the Web Intelligence Conference held in Toronto (USA), has been put to the test with 24 major premieres such as
Alice in Wonderland ,
Avatar or
New Moon , predicting the box office results with an
accuracy of 97.3% . The tool could be very useful for Hollywood since, among other things, its creators say, it can help film studios decide if they need to do a last-minute boost to their advertising campaigns, or reduce investment because the success is already guaranteed.
Huberman says this is only the beginning and that Twitter could be used to predict the success of “all kinds of things,” such as new products and gadgets. Algorithms based on this social network could even be applied to advance the results of electoral campaigns . ? Twitter, with its huge flow of information in real time, has the power to track people’s real interests ,? adds the researcher.
