This post is inspired by the following tweet sent by Ashton
Kutcher.
“How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I
find it in poor taste,” Kutcher tweeted.
Now imagine if Ashton had access to a tweeting tool that
provided a real time sentiment analysis of the subject matter of his tweet in
composition.
Something as simple as a circle with a color indicator to
indicate the sentiment across a spectrum of green to red and the size of the
bubble representing the tweet volume on that particular subject matter(s) that
Ashton was trying to tweet about. This would provide an immediate heads up that
maybe Ashton wants to do some more research on this matter before sending the
tweet out.
As twitter takes on a bigger role as a virtual global public
square, there is a need for people to engage constructively and tools of this
kind will go a long way in helping people have a healthy dialogue on subjects
and begin to engage positively with this seamless and global medium of
communication.
Seems like USC is investing some thinking in this domain http://politics.twittersentiment.org/streams/project.html
