With social media playing a more significant role in The London 2012 Olympic Games, the city of London will be using its most famous Ferris wheel to display the mood of the nation.
The 394-foot London Eye will serve as a Twitter-fueled mood ring during London 2012, changing colours based on the sentiments shared in England through the social networking service.
Just how will they know how all of England is feeling at any given time?
According to a story on Mashable.com, a primary utility company in the country has enlisted the help of “the UK’s foremost expert on Twitter sentiment analysis,” Mike Thelwall, along with a team of MIT graduates with expertise in linguistic analysis.
The team will analyze the tweets of the nation to determine what colour the Ferris wheel should be. They will scan Twitter using common searchable phrases surrounding London 2012 such as ‘Olympics’, ‘Torch Relay’, ‘#energy2012’ and ‘London 2012’, then use a “sentiment algorithm” to decide how the country is feeling.
Once they’ve decided whether the people of England are happy, sad or somewhere in between, the corresponding colour will be displayed on the London Eye during a 30-minute light show each night.
Yellow will symbolize positive, green will be neutral and purple negative.
With only three colours to choose from, it will likely be easy to predict the show’s theme each night depending on Great Britain’s success in competition that day.
The idea is based on mood rings, which gained popularity in the late 1970s and claimed to change colours based on the emotional state of the person wearing it.
