Tweetbeat: The Global Twitter Heartbeat

A Big Brain supercomputer is processing 50 million tweets a day and is visualizing real-time heat maps of positive and negative sentiments expressed on Twitter. This really is Big Social. Silicon Graphics International (SGI) has partnered with researchers from the University of Illinois to scan tweets in a project called the Global Twitter Heartbeat using SGI’s UV 2000 Big Brain supercomputer. The computer analyzes every tweet to assign location and tone values and then visualizes the conversation in a heat map infographic that combines and displays tweet location, intensity and tone. What’s amazing to me is that the entire process from ingest to data analysis to heat map visual is completed in less than a second. So far, the Heartbeat project looked at two big recent events – Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. Presidential Election. In both events, millions of tweets were sent and analyzed. Check out the maps below, positive in blue and negative in red. Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat US Presidential Election 2012 Tweetbeat More info and charts here