Hey, Science: Will This Post Get Shared on Twitter?

You can use Twitter to predict swings in the stock market. You can use it to predict movies' success at the box office. You can use it to predict the spread of illness.

Turns out, you can also use Twitter to predict news articles' popularity ... on Twitter.

Over at HP Labs, the researchers Bernardo Huberman, Sitaram Asur, and Roja Bandari, using the API of the aggregator Feedzilla, collected a sample of over 40,000 articles posted to Twitter over a week-long span last August. The team then analyzed and rated the articles they'd gathered according to four factors: the news outlet that writes and first tweets the article; the information category that the article fits into; the relative emotion of the article's language; and the people and things named in the article.

The Atlantic