There are a number of services like
Twistori which use Twitter and RSS feeds to assess what emotions users are feeling, but none have gone into as much detail as
"We Feel Fine". The flash-based web application gives the user control over what emotions they wish to visualise and then presents updates that express those emotions on a particle map (see gallery below), with which any message or update is viewable with a simple click. You can view both text-based updates and those with photos attached, each of which provide different effects.
Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The age, gender, and geographical location of the author is extracted, where possible, and is saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information can be used as filters to see how people are feeling within macro-situations. Perfect to play around with on a boring Sunday afternoon!
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