Introduced about 2 years ago and still going strong is a form of innovative technology in the website - http://www.wefeelfine.org describing itself as "an exploration of human emotion, in six movements." This technology continually harvests sentences from the broad field of social media that contain the phrase "I feel" or "I am feeling". This information is collected from Internet blog entries, twitter, facebook and other social networking websites and is displayed in an interactive java applet, that runs in any web browser.
The color of each dot represents how a user is feeling. For example: Bright dots are happy and dark dots are sad. In addition, demographic information like age,gender and location are also provided for the user to play with.
What are the implications for marketers? 2 words - Consumer Insights! Due to the depth of information provided through this one website marketers can gain an insight into the needs and wants of their core audiences and target relevant messages accordingly.
On the flip side, this technology does raise privacy concerns. For example: I have signed up only for having my profile on facebook - I would not want my updates and other demographic information broadcasted on an external website.
Nevertheless, this is a revolutionary technology and will be extremely helpful in the current digital economy. Watch Jonathan Harris - the creator of the website in this video
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html
