We Feel Fat & Sassy: Harvesting the Web for Feelings

Sometimes when I stop to think about it I am absolutely blown away by how much information is being posted and sent and shared and read on the Internet. Take a second; think about it…

... ok, so you've thought about all those instant messages, web pages, blog entries, forum posts, emails, tweets, wiki edits, MySpace comments, and Facebook invites that are being shared and read at any given moment? Did you close your eyes? (That probably wasn't necessary) Don’t you agree it’s insane?!

It’s never been so easy to get information. It’s never been so easy to get lost in it all. Can you imagine if there was a way we could take a step back and make sense of it. Well, there isn’t. But, there are couple projects that attempt to give us a sense of what people are "feeling" (or at least communicating about what they are feeling) on the web. These projects “harvest” or “scrape” the web for information and then show it to us in some sort of visualization.

Most notably, WeFeelFine (when you get to the home page click “Open We Feel Fine” and then explore) searches blog entries for occurrences of “I feel” and “I am feeling” and shows the sentence it was found in. Here are couple examples:

i feel like an abandoned tadpole (from someone)
i may be feeling the happiest lady on earth that I will hug the person till he/she suffocated to death & i will have one more ticket (from a 99 year old)
i feel like i cant breathe right (from someone)
i had pretty much forgotten what it was like to be alone and it feels awesome (from a 22 year old in florida)
i feel your pain can i make it right (from someone)
im starting to feel a little guilty though (from someone in Canada)

Merely entertaining at first, it becomes intriguing, and maybe for some addictive. What a 99 year old says might put smile on your face, you might find you totally relate to what that 22 year old from florida said, or you may become overwhelmed with sadness when you read that someone feels "like an abandoned tadpole". I think that alone can provide an interesting experience. However, with all that data being aggregated and with a certain ability to record demographic information we can start answering some interesting questions:

“do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.”

Not surprisingly, the stats shows that 1,209,983 women have expressed 953,436 feelings while only 326,726 men have expressed 668,746 feelings. As one might expect men aren’t likely to start a sentence with “I feel”, but is it representative of how little men share what they are feeling online? Probably. I would encourage you to explore the different views that the site offers.

I feel glad that there are only a few people feeling "deranged" right now.

Note to tech-dorks (being self-inclusive): it has an open API. For example, you could ask it to give you the last 50 feelings from women in Tokyo who feel sad.

Along a similar vane (though often more witty due to the nature of twitter) Twistori shows a feed of “tweets” (i.e. posts to twitter) that contain either “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I believe”, “I feel”, or “I wish”. Here are a couple examples:

i love taking naps. now, i'm full of energy.
the bees are buzzing. the birds are chirping. blarg! i hate that i love spring
i think i just injured myself playing wii bowling...
not only do i believe that 1 person can make a difference, I think it's the only way we can make a difference: helping one person at a time.
there isn't much that i feel i need: a solid soul & the blood i bleed.
i wish that i could go really fast on a really slushy road and slam on the brakes and have the car slide for a long distance