A novel use for a social media tool

CUPERTINO, California (AP) – An online tool to help you get pregnant? Surely, do not let the April 1 dateline fool you.

While dating and romance sites have helped bring couples together for years, there is now an online service that can actually help existing couples find the right time to conceive. Which is not at all what the creators had in mind.

Twitter.com is the breakout web community of 2007. Based on a simple premise, “What are you doing right now?”, hundreds of thousands of “Twitterers” have been sharing their most mundane thoughts and actions for the past several months. Earlier this year attendees at the influential South By Southwest Conference in Austin spurred the site to a new level, bringing together a massive community of users.

It was exactly the sort of data pool Dr. Phil Larkin needed to test his theory.

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