August 25, 2009
Getting Sentimental: Mobile as Real-Time Emotional Gauge
Machines' ability to interpret human language continues to develop and is finally to a point where it can be put to use in powerful ways. There are automatic translators, simple spelling and grammar correctors, chat robots, complex search engines and now there is sentiment analysis, the process of turning human emotion into cold hard data. Using algorithms, computers can mine the mountains of online content and present a report of how the overall population feels about anything from a political campaign to that new burger on the menu in the Dallas test-market.
Companies see value in being able to provide this focus group 2.0 and are developing tools accordingly. Both Scout Labs and Jodange scan forums, social networks, blogs, and mainstream news to come up with opinion data. NBC's O&O sites asks visitors to vote on how they “feel” on all the story pages and then this is displayed via text that appears after pages load. Twitter has been used to analyze sentiment since Summize was experimenting with it in its labs back in 2008. Tweetfeel gives search results a sad or smiley face accordingly. Algorithms are intensely complex because of the linguistic and cultural factors including irony, sarcasm, and slang.
All of this is only made possible with the rise of social media where everyone and anyone can publicly comment and voice their personal opinion in a perfectly prepared package of digital characters. The ubiquity of mobile communication technology is supporting the real time web and allowing on the spot feedback. During Michael Jackson's funeral there were reportedly 5,000 Twitter updates per minute and on Facebook 6,000 status updates per minute.
Mobile technology is driving all of this microblogging and lifestreaming, which is essentially reams of sentiment-ladden data. Mobile is the collection mechanism--like an omnipresent therapist's couch, it invites confession. It does this by breaking down the barriers of inconvenience, time and place, the reasons people would originally avoid updating and sharing. A great example of mobile as real-time emotional gauge is the Track Your Happiness project out of Harvard. Through a mobile website and iPhone app, you can chronicle your emotions and see trends in the factors that affect them. As people continue to stream their lives digitally, companies will eventually learn to forecast, much like the Weather Channel, what reactions to certain happenings will be.
- Caleb Kramer
