Twitter "jobs"

People tweet about how much they love or hate their job, or how they're looking for or need a second job. Basically, a lot of data that could be part of a consumer confidence index or an early indicator for the job market.

Unfortunately, tweets containing the word "job" are mostly job offers written by bots. To tease out the signal in this stream, I first used a naive Bayesian classifier to separate out bots from humans. As expected, there is a pattern to the tweeting: humans don't talk much about their jobs on the week-ends.

Since bots are trying to get clicks, I conclude that people are least likely to click on job ads on a Saturday and least likely job hunting on a Thursday.

Here are some pretty graphs, care of Google Docs:

If you want access to the raw data or have ideas for how to use Twitter to build indicators, please get in touch.

Next up: teasing out the different meanings of "Job" and "Jobs". Steve Jobs, Book of Job, attaboys... few occurrences of "job" are actually employment-related.