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Track Sleeping Patterns With Twitter, You Crazy Stalker

by Terrence O'Brien on March 23, 2010 at 04:05 PM

Twitter is the ultimate stalker tool. You can monitor what people do, where they are, and what they eat, thanks to their tendency to overshare on the micro-blogging service. And if you have a frequent updater and know their time zone of residence, you can figure out when they sleep.

SleepingTime.org automates that process. Pop in a Twitter username, and SleepingTime.org looks at the person's location and when they tend to update. Using that data, it spits out a rough estimation of the time and duration of the user's sleep.

It's an interesting toy, but analyzing tweets to find sleeping patterns has its limitations. We compared SleepingTimer.org's estimates with the professed sleeping patterns of four Switched staffers, and found it was way off mark for two of us. This may have had something to do with those staffers' aversion to updating during the weekend, when they're not sitting in front of a PC all day. The other two said it was pretty spot on.

A 50-percent accuracy rate places SleepingTime squarely in the novelty category instead of a serious stalker tool. That's actually a good thing, though; we were pretty freaked out by the idea, to be honest. [From: SleepingTime.org, via: DownloadSquad]

Tags: sleep, sleepingtime.org, social networking, socialnetworking, stalker, top, twitter, web

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