Last spring the U.S. Library of Congress announced – via Twitter of course -that it has acquired the complete archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. The trove of 140-character message-toids is expected to yield a treasure of revelations about how we interact and who we are individually and collectively in the first full decade of the Digital Era.

But we don’t have to wait until analysts have divined the archive’s significance. Some researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University have already extracted some fascinating patterns from a sampling of 300 million tweets, and they’ve even mapped them.

The New York Times, reporting on the study, informs us that “You’re probably happiest in the morning and least satisfied about noon. Analyzing words in those posts, researchers found that Thursday is the saddest day; Sunday, the happiest… The moods were mapped, showing happy times [the greener areas in the video] and unhappy (red areas).”  It looks like folks on the west coast are generally happier than us grumpy northeasterners.  Can we get some of what they’re smoking?

Compare your mood swings to those in the video, and if you’re out of sync with them, well, hell, folks, get with the program!

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.