I mentioned a site called We Feel Fine but I wanted to highlight it again for those who missed it earlier.
The site finds people’s emotions and displays them in a very cool graphical way. The simplicity grants even the first time user solid understanding, and you don’t need to read an explanation or a guide to use the site.
For example, here is a picture of everyone who is in their 20s and happy in the United States. As you see I’ve clicked on one of the dots floating on my screen and find a mother who is very happy to have pleased her children. She is 29, lives in Seattle, and it was raining as she wrote the post.
This interface first drew me to the site, which I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. But now I see so much more. Notice in the bottom left corner. You can explore metrics if you like numbers or mounds if you like graphs. Mobs let you watch trends, and you can filter by age, location, gender, weather and feeling. Murmurs will show you a changing list of quotes from randomly picked blogs within your search criteria.
The site uses many of the popular social networking sites and the blogs on them to track the feelings. You click on a quote to find which blog the person was writing on. It seems from my rudimentary tests that MySpace is the most popular although I can’t be sure. It doesn’t matter though, since the point is that the user does not have to interact with the whole internet, just the site. Go and play around with it now.
Note: this may get a little techy now.
I encountered the site by leafing through the examples found on the web page for the underlying technology, Processing. Processing is an open source programming language intended on making presentation easy, so that all you need to do is draw something, and Processing will code it up for you. As far as I can tell, it’s a non-technical version of the WPF or maybe Silverlight. I’m glad to see many people are attacking the engineer-user divide, since as it stands, you must be both a great software designer and a great artist to produce great computer art. Needless to say, those two disciplines don’t always overlap. I’d rather that the great software developers figured out a way for the artists to create art, and then, to each his own.
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