• New technology picks up on diners' tweets and location of restaurant
  
• It compares data with food inspectors and generates a map of poor places
  

By Anthony Bond

PUBLISHED: 03:42 EST, 15 August 2013 | UPDATED: 08:57 EST, 15 August 2013

Hungry diners looking for a nice meal could soon be warned off bad restaurants by Twitter.

New technology has been developed which can pick up on disgruntled diners tweets and the location of the restaurant where they had the poor meal.

Comparing information with food inspectors, it then generates a map of restaurants which offer bad food standards.

As reported by The Times, Vincent Silenzio, from the University of Rochester, which developed the technology, said: 'People criticise folks for oversharing on Twitter and social media, but there's a benefit.

'Currently, you can only identity a bad place after the fact. The promise of this system is that you can identify things almost in real time and provide a better detection system than you have now.'

The researchers developed the idea after analysing 3.8million tweets from about 94,000 New Yorkers.

Using a computer system called nEmesis, they are able to sift through comments made on Twitter and match up the user's location with a restaurant's address.

The team then compared their findings with data from U.S. government food inspectors and found that their map correlated with restaurants which had received poor ratings from officials.

The system's developers say the technology could be broadened out in the future.

One idea is that it could be used to track diseases and allow health professionals to prevent them  spreading.

Mr Silenzio said the team could have turned the idea into an app for food lovers to use. However, they decided to hand over their work to health officials.