The New York Times has an article today about sentiment analysis, a trend which has been accelerating on the back of the Real-time Web – and Twitter in particular. Sentiment analysis is no short-term hot trend. It will eventually become a key feature of search engines, which will integrate the aggregate sentiment of the crowd into search results.
The NY Times article looked at 3 sentiment analysis tools: Scout Labs, The Financial Times’ Newssift, and Jodange. It also mentioned 3 Twitter apps: Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. In our post we take a look at five other examples of how sentiment analysis is starting to ramp up on the Web. We invite you to add more examples in the comments.
1. Social Media Monitoring and Analysis: Sysomos
Sysomoslaunched its two flagship products in June: MAP (‘Media Analysis Platform’) and Heartbeat. As Frederic Lardinois wrote: both products are powerful (but costly) social media monitoring and analysis tools.
MAP is a powerful and flexible analysis tool. It gives its users the ability to research any topic on blogs, social media sites, and in traditional news media reports. MAP can, for example, tell you that the largest number of Twitter users who wrote about the Palm Pre come from California and Great Britain. It can also quickly give you a history of when and how often a Wikipedia article was edited, or what the most popular forum posts and YouTube videos about the any given topic were in the last 30 days. Heartbeat provides a subset of MAPs features, with a focus on making it easy for companies to track social media metrics.
See also: This Machine Eats Tweets: The System Behind @Comcast and Others
2. Conversation Monitoring: Backtype
As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a post from April, a whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online. For example, Backtype is an online tool that lets you search for and monitor keywords across the Web in an effort to put an end to ‘comment fragmentation.’ It’s also used under the hood at Radian6.
3. Mood Analysis: LiveJournal & MoodViews
In his recent analysis Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?, Marshall Kirkpatrick explored the connection between communication on social networks and real-world events. As an example, he pointed to a tool called MoodViews which can correlate mood messages on LiveJournal with world events. Some of the trends noted using this tool:
- Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005
- Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005
- Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005.
MoodViews updates every 10 minutes based on LiveJournal posts. As of writing, these moods were “hot”: irritated, stressed, thoughtful, cheerful, creative.
Hope was big in November 2008. Image: omnicam
See also: Feel Good: Top 10 Mood Apps and Visualizers
4. Semantic Search: Evri’s New Sentiment API
Earlier this month semantic search engine Evri released a new sentiment web API that claims to understand how the web feels. As Sarah Perez wrote: while busy scouring the net for people, places, and things and determining the relationships between them, the search engine is now able to understand the feelings associated with these entities, too, be them positive or negative. Using the API, developers can build applications for things like market intelligence, market research, sports and entertainment, brand management, product reviews and more.
The sentiment API does much more than most Twitter sentiment trackers – it allows you deeper insight into the “who’s,” and “what’s,” and “why’s” associated with the particular expression or feeling.
5. Twitter as Zeitgeist
How can we do a round-up of sentiment analysis tools without mentioning Twitter? Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in March about the Twitter platform turning 3:
“Twitter already ‘breaks news’ faster than traditional media outlets on a regular basis and monitoring the ebb and flow of conversation is helping media, marketers and academics put their finger on the pulse of a significant number of people.
From the front page of Twitscoop.
We’ve seen how breaking large numbers of Twitter followers into topical groups can help make the service much, much more useful. We expect to see services launched soon that will take the pulse of topical groups. Bubbling up hot topics early in the world of physicists on Twitter, real estate agents, stock traders, etc. is a powerful tactic that more than one company will cash in on. We’ll all benefit when that happens, too.”
See also: 7 Top Twitter Topic Trackers
Top image: .michael.newman.
