Using Social Media to predict Marcoeconomic tends

While I am very leery of using Twitter to predict economic trends particularly in time to anticipate trading trends in the financial markets, I do believe they may be useful in terms of predicting marcoeconomic trends.

Google introduced this idea in 2009 with a paper by Hal Varian. This work was based on the mining of Google searches, and it proved to be pretty effective. I believe similar or maybe more accurate results can be obtained by mining social media. This is because many tweets and posts are richer than simple Google searches. If you are looking for a good R base twitter client try twitteR. The same author of that package wrote an R based Stack Exchange client called RStackExchange. RStackExchange may provide some foreshadowing of technology and software trends