"What are they Thinking?" - Accessing Collective Intelligence in Twitter

In today's social networks like Twitter and Facebook, each day millions of status updates provide a huge source of information on current sentiments of their users. However, still it is unclear how to structure problems in a way that they can be answered based on social networking activities. Facilitating an exploratory prototype, we tested the direct retrieval of user opinions during the FIFA World Cup 2010 in Twitter. Our findings based on an initial research framework suggest that using social networks can serve as an access point to collective intelligence. However, the experiment also showed weaknesses of the used approach. Therefore we discuss an updated research model based on our results which provides a foundation for future works.