‘You’ and Bieber top Xmas Tweet wishlists, but the hippo is closing in
“You” is, hands down, the No. 1 thing people want for Christmas
according to Xmas Tweets, the website from Professor Derek Ruths’s
research lab at 㽶Ƶ’s 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, “aliens” came in at No. 25 – and dogs beat out cats.
What people want for Christmas mostly translates into what people
buy. “According to the list, Apple products are 10 times more
popular than Android phones,” Ruths said. “This can give us an
indication of how people are going to spend money this
season.”
How people wish also tells us what they value most – and it’s not
all consumerism. The combined Tweets seeking meaningful
relationships – including “You” in Twitter-speak – outnumber any
single product. And there are other non-product wants. “The fact
that 'money' and 'jobs' rank 15th and 16th reflects real concerns
in these challenging economic times,” he said.
For the moment, Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber is the top
single item on the Xmas Tweet site, nosing out “Hippo,” 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. 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.
“You can’t take a large enough survey to get this kind of
information,” 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’t end once Santa has slid down the chimney.
Ruths has plans for the post-holiday season, too. “Once the
wrapping paper is ripped open, we’ll start looking at what Twitter
users actually got for Christmas.”