Twitter as a service is very oriented towards people providing short, succinct and relatively immediate ‘in the moment’ updates on what they’re interested in and how they feel- and at a very large scale. At the moment we have around 250 million twitter users! We felt it was the ideal environment for us to test our hypotheses that we could, in fact, gauge the public’s mood state from this type of data- and use that to study and even predict socioeconomic phenomenon of which the market is just one.