Few months ago, Google launched a service called Google Flu Trends that explore flu trends across the U.S. by compiling search queries made by Internet users in the United States. This is much faster than traditional ways which takes around few days to even several weeks to detect flu trends.
Recently-launched Twitter app, SickCity functions quite similar to Google Flu Trends. Basically what SickCity does is that it is a realtime disease detector that shows trends of popular cities and countries by grabbing information from Twitter. It mainly tracks keyword such as flu, food poisoning, headcolds, chicken pox and sore throats. Currently, it has 30+ countries included in the list and you can click on each of them to view the trends. SickCity also does compiles data for specific cities in the world and the top 3 includes New York, London and San Francisco.
I personally feel that using Twitter to collect trends about disesase doesn’t seems to be a great idea as most tweets made by Twitter users are mainly about technology and latest news. It’s quite rare to find tweets that reports sickness in a particular city. On the ohter hand, Google Flu Trends will be a wonderful alternative as it makes use of its Google Search engine to compile search queries related to flu made by Internet users.
According to SickCity, it plans to collect information from messages on Facebook soon.