Reading the Fast Company article on how Twitter is being used now as an accurate means of predicting sales or behavior.  In this case movies.  While the application of Twitter as an effective prediction engine is limited at this point – it yet again points to a positive reading of the “law of unintended consquences.” Twitter has proved itself useful in functions that its creators could not have imagined.   From the article:

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 method works even better than the most accurate method currently in use, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX)….

Twitter might be more than just a mirror of mass sentiment–the service might also influence it. In other words, could you actually make a product launch far more successful with a really smart Twitter strategy?

Related posts:

1. The Productivity Myth – Step Away From the Twitter – Get Back to Work
2. Subscribing to People – Not Magazines. One More Reason Why Twitter Matters