Social networking site Twitter has found a new application - according to research from HP the movies that get talked about the most are likely to be the biggest hits.

That's not exactly what the HP release says, of course. It talks about measurement, it talks about accuracy and it talks about the uncanniness of its forecasts based on the amount of Twitter traffic for a particular film.

The substance, though, is that the more people talk about a movie, the better it's likely to do at the Box Office.

Call me old-fashioned but I could probably have guessed that. And I'd have charged a lot less than senior researchers at a major technology company.