One Wordcloud A Day

The big news today is that a plane carrying 66 people from Paris to Cairo has disappeared. Just now Guardian reported that French president Hollande has confirmed that the plane has crashed but no cause for the crash has been determined yet. The plane is still missing though. The wordcloud is as expected talking about the flight from Paris to Cairo. It's speculated that the plance went down in the Mediterranean and that's why you see this word appearing a few times in the tweets. It seems that the tweets are simply spreading this news. There is a little mention of prayers. Literally no mention of terrorism or terrorist, which implies that people are not openly speculating that yet. The sentiment is surprisingly positive. I can't figure out why! Perhaps the tweets mentioning prayers, praying, families, thoughts, etc. are adding to this.

Google's largest annual event - the I/O conference - is taking place right now. You can find more news about it on Techcrunch or other tech blogs I have around 32K clean tweets for the analysis. I was interested in knowing which Google products get most mention. I didn't use Google in the wordcloud because it would be obviously the most commonly used word. Well, as it turns out Android is the most popular product that was discussed in these tweets. Allo is the new chat app that Google introduced to take on iMessage. Overall sentiment was quite positive but there were still around 18% negative tweets. These could be because of Google invited people to suggest what its next version of Android should be called. It starts with N so basically it was open to a lot of racist jokes.

Today George Zimmarman is trending because he announced that he will auction off the gun he used to kill Treyvon Martin. It's pretty sad. Anyway I decided to use this search term for getting the wordcloud because generally I don't have negative keywords on this blog. I was also curious to know whether people on Twitter will support him or oppose him.  As it's apparent from the sentiment graph, a majority of Twitter users disliked the news. The sentiment is overly negative with only about 10% people saying positive things about it. In the wordcloud, the main discussion topic is "gun" and words around it. This is not surprising because George Zimmarman usually is not trending. So this bunch of tweets are all about the auctioning of the gun. I think a lot of people also were a bit outraged because his name is "trending" on Twitter. But by showing this outrage probably they added to the trending topic! For example, this tweet received a lot of

Well, I know I am late to the party. The Mother's Day was yesterday and I hope all of you celebrated it with your moms! I am surprised that there were still around 11% tweets that were negative!

The big news in the technology sector today is that SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, launched a satellite and successfully retrieved the first stage vehicle, which they can now reuse. More details about the story are here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/06/a-spacex-rocket-just-stuck-its-landing-on-a-barge/ There was a hashtag trending today but when I started the download, I didn't get many tweets. Then I decided to download the non hashtagged tweets and there I received plenty. The wordcloud is quite interesting because the most commonly occurring word is Mars. This is because SpaceX is planning to send a rocket to Mars in 2018 and it seems that this week there has been some talk about that announcement. Also, with today's successful landing of the first-stage rocket, people are likely speculating the success of a Mars mission in near future. I found it interesting that people didn't have a lot of mentions for Elon Musk himself.