Twitter and the Oscars: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

We all love the Oscars and we all love to Tweet about them.  Like other events, Twitter enhances the experience for everyone. As you can see in the Twist chart, the Oscars have been the most popular conversations on Twitter over the past 24 hours. Hadn’t you felt that there was great data and insight hidden in all those tweets? It would be an extremely arduous task to unlock it though.  That’s why I was so excited to learn about Thummit.

  More than just an aggregator of Twitter discussions about the Oscars, Thummit is a social/mobile recommendation service in private beta used to evaluate sentiment of Tweets.

Unlike the plethora of polls and aggregators of #Oscars hashtags, Thummit delivers rankings based on everyone's first impressions.  It's also an interesting example of putting engaging structure around the unstructured Twitter data.

Thummit tracked the Oscars chatter in real time by: 

• aggregating/filtering thousands of Twitter updates relevant to the Oscars
• Analyzing sentiments to see which updates are positive (Thumbs Up) and negative (Thumbs down) and 
• Ranking the Tweets based on most popular and least popular.

Other Highlights included:

• Hugh Jackman got a big Thumms Up, (over 80%), despite many people's concerns before the show on how he would do.
• Among the bombs: Jessica Biel, (only 13% Thumms Up), Zac Efron (13%), and Miley Cyrus (16%).  And Philip Seymour Hoffman's hat didn't earn him rave reviews.
• The big Oscar winner, Slumdog Millionaire, did quite well  (76%), but struggled to crack the Top 10 list.  Perhaps they were too successful; as the night wore on and the awards piled up, the negative comments increased.

Thummit has also been used to rate the Super Bowl commercials and the Inauguration. It's cool to see Tweets analyzed as opposed to simply aggregated, which I think is the value here. Hopefully, we will see much more of Thummit as I think it is a great service, don’t you?

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• Thummit Scopes Out Twitter To Rate The Oscars In Real Time (techcrunch.com)
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