This is a response to Jonathan Harrison’s blog post Capturing the Power of a Social Chain Reaction.

As a incoming BTM major and all around nerd when it comes to computers and tech stuff I read Jonathan’s blog with the glee of a small child in a candy store. His article talks about how powerful viral video are and why aren’t companies taking advantage of this growing trend.

Along with that sentiment Jonathan also talks about while viral videos are powerful how important and difficult it is to create one. The extreme difficulty of creating something funny yet not too funny that your message gets lost.

This got me thinking about how there are companies/people out there leveraging all this kind of stuff to learn about people. There was a TED talk I watched where they were using Twitters  API to look at trends and even cooler look at where people where flying from and to.

Image from Google

They were able to search and collect data for a specific time in which they collected any information regarding a tweet about someone flying somewhere and then also collected where that user was posting from. By doing that they are able to show when/where people were flying for a given period. That ability to harness free and seemingly meaningless information is amazing. They go on to explain how that information was then used to look at how a disease could spread in a global scale.

While thee may not be too many people doing what Jonathan as talking about, there are definitely people out there that are thinking the same way. I am sure that this example is just the tip if the ice burg in social media.