In 2009, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, computer scientists at HP Labs, examined nearly 3 million Twitter updates over a period of three months. They were looking for tweets mentioning any of twenty-four movies released in that time, from Avatar to The Spy Next Door, to see whether the number of tweets said anything about each movie’s success. It turned out that the rate at which a movie was being discussed correlated almost exactly with how well it would do at the box office the following weekend. The rate was correct 98 percent of the time! Also, 94 percent of the time, the ratio of fans-to-haters on Twitter indicated how far a movie would rise or fall the following week.