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AP Photo/Kathy Willens
clairvoyance

Twitter could be trying to predict the next viral tweet

The @magicstats account predicts which tweets will become popular by favouriting them.

TWITTER COULD BE trying to predict the next viral tweets thanks to a new experimental account.

The account @magicstats favourites tweets that will become popular in real-time. Although it hasn’t officially been confirmed as an official account, it follows the same process as previous experimental accounts Twitter has tested out in recent times.

The account is currently private but both The Next Web and TechCrunch have noticed how it favoured tweets that became popular a few minutes after posting, although it was never the first account to do this.

Twitter has been experimenting with different accounts over the last few months to help make the site more user-friendly. The most popular one was @magicrecs, which recommends new accounts that your network is following and @eventparrot, which alerts users to breaking news stories.

The success of @magicrecs meant that Twitter is rolling out push notifications that recommend new accounts for users to follow. The account has recently started notifying users of popular conversations and hashtags within their network.

Read: Gardaí to use Twitter for major emergency alerts >

Read: Twitter stock grew by 73 per cent on a ‘spectacular’ opening day >

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