The Reason Twitter Selfies Matter

The reason Twitter Selfies Matter: They may reveal our moods. Researchers who recently on won one of Twitter’s first-ever DataGrants plan to analyze 1 million photos tweeted over a period of one year. LiveScience.com says the  researchers are planning to measure the "moods" of some American cities. The team, includes researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the City University of New York. They will work together to correlate the Twitter image data with other sources of happiness data, such as the Gallup Poll results.
One of the project's highlights will be an analysis of selfies that people post on Twitter, to see whether, for instance, people who live in "happier" cities tend to post more selfies, and whether they smile more while taking self-portraits. The researchers will focus mostly on images --as opposed to the words-- in tweets. The reason: They believe that the selfies might “transcend the limitations of language.” (Bartha)