FrowningSmile Promises To Finally Measure Happiness of Social Media Users

Lately I’ve been noticing that the vast majority of newly-launched startups looked very much like something we have already seen before - but with great modifications that make the copy much better and usable than the original was. But unfortunately that does not really mean that the clone will ever be able to grab users from the original product and in the vast majority of cases users will stick to the original product they’ve been using for ages instead of migrating to a better analogue - in hopes that the beloved product will eventually be improved enough for them to use it.

All in all, I’d say that the recession does not really make the environment very favorable to new startups and this definitely makes really new and innovative ideas stand out from the crowd and hopefully shine. Today I think I have an example of a product that actually promises to do something I have not see before myself - the name is FrowiningSmile and the idea behind the startup is to measure our happiness online.

Usually social media content like blogs and Twitter streams is used widely for communications by regular users, and for data collection and promotion by all sorts of marketers and social media gurus. But FrowningSmile is going to use such content for a totally different purpose - to see how happy the people that generate the content are.

Basically what the service is told to do is crawling blogs and Twitter updates to find various signs that will show happiness or unhappiness of people behind the blogs and updates and after processing the results they produce a total report based on the information collected. The report is presented as a graph with two lines - a green one for happy people and a blue one for sad ones. So basically FrowiningSmile is intended for everyone to watch people around the world change their mood and growing from happy over the weekend to sad on the Monday morning.

Also the service offers information on the happiest countries of all so the countries that have a rapidly growing number of happy people versus sad people get listed here. It is also possible to see details for each country to see the trends. A useful addition is that for every country the happiness details are accompanied with the latest news related to this country to see what events can influence the mood of the people living in this or that place.

The problem that I see with the site is that it’s pretty difficult to understand exactly how the guys behind the new site determine happiness or unhappiness - there are no details of keywords or characters (like smileys maybe) used to measure how happy social media users are around the world so people will hardly take the application seriously. Also what I would like such a service to do is measure happiness of individual people instead of measuring global happiness so that I could know when a person I badly need to talk to is in a good mood and probably quite approachable and when he or she is not in a such good position to talk to.

But even as it is FrowningSmile is a nice time-waster anyway. Of course it is pretty hard to imagine any real practical use for an application like this but it is still pretty fun to get to know that the web users are 15% more happy today than they were yesterday. At least it can give you an understanding of when we approach the end of the current recession as people will probably be getting happier from day to day.