You've heard of TGIF, but how about TGIM?

It stands for "thank goodness it's morning" and seems like an appropriate response to a massive tweet study conducted by social scientists at Cornell University.

After studying half a billion tweets from 84 countries to see what they might reveal about worldwide emotions, the Cornell team drew a few conclusions about human happiness.

One is that people seem more cheerful in the morning than at night (TGIM); another is that people express happier emotions from December until the end of June (TGID.) Neither is a big surprise, after all, #TGIM is already a popular hashtag on Twitter. But both are intriguing findings in this latest large-scale tweet analysis.

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Are Twitter and Facebook fortunetellers? A startup called Fizziology seems to think so.

Fizziology monitors social media chatter to detect trends. It attempts to gauge the "buzz'' around new movies, for example, to predict which will be box-office winners.

Fizziology is a new type of company specializing in what some call social metrics or the science of measuring social media. In particular, Fizziology focuses on serving the entertainment industry.

In case you missed them, here are some interesting social media headlines of the past week:

Youtoo Can Be a Social Media Star

Veteran Hollywood producer Mark Burnett has teamed with a startup called Youtoo TV to launch a participatory TV network described as "Facebook for TV," the LostRemote blog reports.The idea is to put hundreds of people on this new social TV network every day; think YouTube for the BoobTube. The Youtoo network was originally called AmericanLife TV Network, but now that it's focused on social media, the company has decided to rebrand itself.

Employers vs. Workers in Social Media

More than 100 complaints have been filed at the National Labor Relations Board involving workplace controversies over material workers posted on social media about their employers, according to the Associated Press. The article suggests workplace social media clashes are on the rise, especially in the past year.

Social Media Good For Coordinating, Not Sustaining Action

Social media may be great for organizing political action and protests, but not for building "political parties on a grand scale" or political movements that last, according to an article in Business Week. The article contends that in-person contact is required to build the common beliefs required for successful political organizations. Social media is more useful for coordinating political action than maintaining it, the article suggests.

Facebook announced radical changes to its social networking platform Thursday that seem likely to intensify the role it plays in people's lives and intensify privacy concerns. Not surprisingly, the changes have annoyed many Facebook users while pleasing a lot of others.

In a nutshell, Facebook is angling to chronicle much more about people's lives than the simple status updates, photo uploads and "like" buttons have allowed it to do so far.  Facebook plans to do so in part through a bunch of automatic sharing apps that will let people share what they're doing without having to actively post about it.

Among the big changes:

• New apps -- Facebook is opening its software platform to new types of apps designed to let people have more of their everyday activities posted to or recorded by Facebook. These new apps will be varied, but the early ones Facebook showcased include music-sharing partnerships with services like Spotify to let people automatically update their Facebook friends on each song they're listening to. Friends can click to listen in real time with them to the same music, offering a new kind of sharing on Facebook.
• Timeline -- At the end of this week, Facebook plans to roll out a revamped profile to everyone. Called Timeline, it offers a visual view of your Facebook activities over time, ordered chronologically. The idea is to let you (and your friends) visually scroll back in time and review your life on Facebook. Even though most of this information already has been viewable by your friends, some privacy hackles are going up at how much easier it's going to be to scroll back through people' lives. Some folks worry that this might take Facebook "stalking" to new levels.
• Ticker -- Facebook rolled out an all-new feed of real-time info about your friends' activities and displays it in a vertically moving ticker in the right sidebar. The ticker is designed to showcase less important or significant activity that might not make your news feed, for example. Unlike the news feed, which often has lags in time for posts, the ticker is designed to show what's happening in real time. That scrolling action has annoyed a lot of users, though.
• News Feed/Most Recent: The stream of updates you see now combines into a single "News Feed" view what used to be separated into two separate streams labeled "Top News" and "Most Recent." Facebook announced the change in its blog. It annoyed a lot of people who object to having the cherry-picked "Top News" displayed prominently at the top, while they are no longer being able to switch to the purely chronological view that "Most Recent" used to represent. Facebook offers a description of the new news feed.

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