Can sentiment analysis be as simple as installing a browser plug-in and scrolling down a screen? You bet, and you might want to check out the latest from ViralHeat. In a matter of minutes, you too can be getting in touch with your feelings, or at least the feelings of those folks that you correspond with on Twitter. The tool has been updated to analyze Facebook’s fan pages, timeline, news feed and comments.
We last wrote about them earlier this summer here, when they released an API to do sentiment analysis. Now they have built this plug-in from the interface. You can train the tool (as you see here) to be more positive or negative than it initially guesses, if you want, or you can just accept the defaults. You do have to scroll up and down to collect all the content that is displayed on screen, and you can see the results change at the top of your screen.
I looked over my Tweetstream and got 73% positive and 18% neutral comments. (hah: better than MacManus. It Must Be Working!) If you are looking for a quick and dirty tool to tell you how others think of you at a glance, check it out. If you add this to Klout’s plug-in and Rapportive’s plug-in you can get a lot done for basically no software cost too.
