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Twitter isn't just a place for strangers to read your rants about life in 140 characters. The social network's data-gathering ways is also the perfect platform to be used to predict big, potentially world-shaking events.

One recent MIT study which analyzed thousands of tweets associated with the 2013 coup in Egypt claims that the social unrest associated with it was, in fact, predictable ahead of time.

In order to predict crowd behavior, the researchers mined data from more than 300,000 public information sources, including news sites, countless blogs and social media:
Using natural language processing, event information is extracted from content such as type of event, what entities are involved and in what role, sentiment and tone, and the occurrence time range of the event discussed. Statements made on Twitter about a future date from the time of posting prove particularly indicative. We consider in particular the case of the 2013 Egyptian coup d'etat. The study validates and quantifies the common intuition that data on social media (beyond mainstream news sources) are able to predict major events.
While the experiment does present an interesting thesis, these results should probably be taken with a grain of salt since Twitter still hasn't actually been used to accurately predict an event in the future.

[FastCompany ]