Twitter Predicts Box-Office Sales Better than a Prediction Market

Researchers at HP Labs discover that Twitter can predict, with astonishing accuracy, how well a movie will sell.

We've all got the vague intuition that Twitter allows you track, in real-time, what people are concerned about or obsessed with. But this is a little freaky: Two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, have discovered that you can actually use Twitter mentions to predict how well a movie will do in it's first couple weekends of release. What's more, the...