While we’ve heard in the past that Twitter can be a killer box office predictor, the same might not be true for social media and television ratings.

Social media monitoring company Viralheat spent a month tracking social media mentions — a million of them, in fact — right around the time that nine major TV shows were airing their season finales. The company looked at data from Twitter,Facebook, YouTube, Google Buzz and other sources, including the sentiment of all these mentions, comments and updates.

Then Viralheat compared the social media buzz with the Nielsen TV ratings for each show. Does chatter on the web equate to eyeballs on TV screens?

Not necessarily. Their research determined:

• Online buzz does not always correlate with ratings.
• Sentiment analysis of social media chatter casts those mentions in a new light.
• Even when ratings are lukewarm (as was the case for the Lost season finale) social media chatter can be overwhelming in volume. But a lot of those mentions online expressed a negative sentiment.
• Some shows, including Dancing With The Stars, saw good TV ratings but not many mentions online.

All in all, Viralheat found that Nielsen ratings combined with social media sentiment analysis provided the best snapshot of how a show’s season finale performed with viewers.

So, for you would-be social media gurus, next time you’re trying to measure a brand’s impact on the social web, remember to include some sentiment analysis along with your headcount, or you could be missing out on some critical information.

Here’s the infographic with more interesting factoids than you can shake a stick at; click to see the full version.

Netflix released an app for Apple’s new iPad, allowing subscribers who bought the device on launch day to access the service’s vast library of streaming films and television. The iPad won’t be stealing all of the thunder from the already-popular iPhone and iPod touch, however; a Netflix Watch Instantly app is in the works for those devices, too.

Netflix made that clear in a very brief blog post today:

Steve Swasey, VP of Corporate Communications, here. Terrific response to our news today about Netflix on the iPad. For those of you asking whether Netflix will be on the iPhone and iPod Touch: We wouldn’t invite you to dinner without planning to serve dessert. In other words, we’re working on it so stay tuned.

We already knew that a Netflix app for the iPhone and iPod touch was a possibility because Netflix has been asking users for their opinions on a hypothetical iPhone/iPod touch app in online surveys. Given that an iPad app has already been released and that the iPad and the iPhone are very similar platforms, you can understand why we’re not surprised.

This is just another step in a long march for Netflix. The service started out mailing DVDs to customers, but it has signed numerous film and TV studios to provide content for its Watch Instantly streaming service, which is now the main draw for many tech-savvy folks. More recently, video game consoles like the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have been updated with Netflix streaming capability.

Plans start at $8.99 per month. Available films and shows include 30 Rock, Weeds, King of the Hill, 24, Julie and Julia, The Proposal, Angels & Demons, The Sixth Sense and numerous others.