Lubbock could use a spot of good news. This week, the city became the laughingstock of the nation after Lubbock County Judge Tom Head declared that UN troops will invade the city if if President Obama is reelected. And earlier this year the city of 230,000 landed in the top slot of Chemistry.com’s list of “The Top 10 Cities That Value Sex the Least.”
But now, Lubbockites can take comfort in the fact that some Ukrainian software engineers now think it is the one of the friendliest places in America. How did they come to this determination? The engineers from Vertaline, a software firm based in Lviv, a city about three times the size of Lubbock in Western Ukraine, monitored tweets from across the United States to see which localities tweeted “good morning” the most, and Lubbock proved to be among the friendliest, appearing alongside Atlanta, San Diego, and Buffalo.
The study also looked at which city was the rudest, by seeing where people tweeted “f–k you” the most. Buffalo topped that list, and Houston ranked high as well.
For their project, titled “Twitter heatmap,” the engineers created a program that scanned Twitter hourly and created a “density map of tweets distributed in time,” the website says.
“The stereotypical crudity of Americans must be of great interest to foreigners, because we were recently put through a curious test by Ukrainians to measure how often we greet others with politeness or with disdain,” John Metcalfe wrote at the Atlantic Cities, dubbing the study “highly unscientific.”
