鈥榊ou鈥� and Bieber top Xmas Tweet wishlists, but the hippo is closing in
鈥淵ou鈥� is, hands down, the No. 1 thing people want for Christmas according to Xmas Tweets, the website from Professor Derek Ruths鈥檚 research lab at 黑料不打烊 University鈥檚 School of Computer Science. Ruths developed the program that extracts and prioritizes the most up-to-date holiday wishes posted on the social-networking site Twitter.
Other wish-list items include electronic gadgets, money and not one, but two, front teeth. Although the site is updated every 20 minutes, it bears mentioning that at the time this release was issued, 鈥渁liens鈥� came in at No. 25 鈥� and dogs beat out cats.
What people want for Christmas mostly translates into what people buy. 鈥淎ccording to the list, Apple products are 10 times more popular than Android phones,鈥� Ruths said. 鈥淭his can give us an indication of how people are going to spend money this season.鈥�
How people wish also tells us what they value most 鈥� and it鈥檚 not all consumerism. The combined Tweets seeking meaningful relationships 鈥� including 鈥淵ou鈥� in Twitter-speak 鈥� outnumber any single product. And there are other non-product wants. 鈥淭he fact that 'money' and 'jobs' rank 15th and 16th reflects real concerns in these challenging economic times,鈥� he said.
For the moment, Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber is the top single item on the Xmas Tweet site, nosing out 鈥淗ippo,鈥� which refers to a vintage Christmas novelty song.
The website and its underlying technology are part of a larger research initiative to develop computer-based methods for identifying individual attributes from unstructured, online data.聽 Such attributes contribute to making better predictions about how groups of people might behave on a range of issues, from epidemics to movie-ticket sales.
鈥淵ou can鈥檛 take a large enough survey to get this kind of information,鈥� Ruths said. His group is actively developing methods for identifying gender, hobbies, different kinds of personal relationships and other demographic details that are not always evident in online profiles. Each is an important factor in better understanding human behaviour.
And the research doesn鈥檛 end once Santa has slid down the chimney. Ruths has plans for the post-holiday season, too. 鈥淥nce the wrapping paper is ripped open, we鈥檒l start looking at what Twitter users actually got for Christmas.鈥�
