Ever wonder how the people in your neighborhood are feeling? How about those that work downtown? Are people really happier on a Friday than a Monday? A new mobile application called Glow will tell you. Designed for the iPhone, this app lets you share your feelings using a simple star-based rating system that you manipulate using a swiping gesture. Once you’ve added your “feeling,” it’s displayed a map so you can see how those around you feel, too. The feelings on the map are represented by glowing colored orbs that range from blue (happy) to red (unhappy). In addition, an augmented reality street view lets you see those same feelings layered on top of real-world photos.
How to Glow
When you first launch the app, five stars appear on the screen. Drag your finger across the stars to rate how you’re feeling at the moment. As you move from one star to five, the colors change from a darker red to a bright blue. Five stars represents you at your happiest while one star means you’re unhappy. Your feeling is then geo-located and tagged to a map. You can zoom in and out and around on the map to see how others in your area are feeling, too. If available, you can switch over to street view to see a sort of augmented reality view which superimposes feelings on top of the actual photos from that location.
For now, the application is limited to the iPhone. And because it was only released a couple of weeks ago, it suffers from the same problem that plagues most newly-launched social media websites: not enough users. That’s unfortunate because the concept, though simple, is definitely intriguing.
But Where’s the Sentiment Analysis?
That said, we wish the app would do even more. A sentiment analysis engine, for example, could analyze tweets and/or public Facebook updates to depict the overall feelings in a particular locale without having to rely on manual updates from iPhone users. These sorts of “feeling” algorithms are already in use on a number of services, including real-time Twitter search engines Tweetfeel and Tweet Sentiments, social media search platform SocialMention, Waggener Edstrom’s trend-tracker Twendz and several others. While it’s nifty that Glow lets you add real-time feeling updates to a map, not including an optional social layer that extracts feelings from social sites and services is an unfortunate (and potentially dooming) omission for what is otherwise a fairly clever concept and implementation.
However, despite its flaws, Glow is a great example of the new and unique types of applications that mobile phones and their location-awareness features make possible. We hope that future updates to the app will take this concept further and provide us with a true analysis of the feelings around us…even from those who don’t use Glow.
If you’re interested in trying Glow on your iPhone, you can download the app here. (Note that if you try to locate the app via the iPhone’s search, you should use the company name “Heckacopter” as the keyword – there are just too many apps with “glow” in the title!)
