Peering into its fire hose of tweets from four big cities around the world, a pair of Twitter engineers, Miguel Rios and Jimmy Lin, have discovered that the Twitter users in Istanbul don’t sleep much in August — and why would they, considering how many people are strolling along Istiklal Avenue on summer evenings. The denizens of Sao Paulo, Brazil, seem to take an afternoon siesta – tweets sharply drop off in the period after lunch.
New Yorkers tend to be as voluble on Twitter during the workday as they are during evenings. But that is not the case for the other three cities. The Japanese in Tokyo appear to be most disciplined about actually working during work hours – they tweet very little, relatively speaking, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Their sleeping hours also appear relatively unchanged over winter and summer.
All this intelligence is potentially lucrative for a global communications business like Twitter. It can inform when to serve up advertisements on the site and potentially for what kinds of products. It also produces very cool graphs and charts.
The data at the disposal of social media companies are, in principle, valuable to other organizations, from soda pop companies to politicians to police agencies that seek to understand human behavior. Location is one of the most useful pieces of information, especially for marketers that want to target their advertising dollars most efficiently.
Facebook this week released a map that political advertisers would find useful in an election year. It matched its users political affiliations with where their physical locations. The map went far beyond the red state versus blue state divide, with far more fine grained information about where Facebook users checked in in various parts of the country.
California, predictably, had large swathes of Democratic blue, but with plenty of Republican red polka dots in in the Orange County and San Diego suburbs.
An earlier version of this post referred to Miguel Rios of Twitter as Manuel Rios.