- Posted by liammclennan on June 2, 2010
The breakable toy that I am currently working on is a twitter customer sentiment analyser.
It scrapes twitter for tweets relating to a particular organisation, applies a machine learning algorithm to determine if the content of tweet is positive or negative, and generates reports of the sentiment data over time, correlated to dates, events and news feeds.
I’m having lots of fun building this, but I would also like to learn if there is a market for quantified sentiment data. So that I can start to show people what I have in mind I have created a mockup of the simplest and most important report. It shows customer sentiment over time, with important events highlighted. As the user moves their mouse to the right (forward in time) the source data area scrolls up to display the tweets from that time. The tweets are colour coded based on sentiment rating.
After I started working on this project I discovered that a team of students have already built something similar. It is a lot of fun to enter your employers name and see what it says.
- Posted by liammclennan on May 23, 2010
I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment.
My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:
and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as:
which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release.
I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are:
- There is no market for this tool
- There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.
- Posted by liammclennan on October 14, 2009
There has always been an employment back-channel. Maybe there was a time when people would pick up the phone when they needed to fill or find a job. More recently people might have sent an IM in that situation. But now it seems that twitter is the medium on which employment transactions occur. A person loses their job, tweets about it, and has a new job within minutes. Or a company is looking to hire, so one of their employees tweets a link to the role and receives qualified applications and recommendations. It’s better for everyone; except the recruitment oligopolists who can no longer charge to be the meeting place between recruit and recruiter. The recruitment back-channel is still about networking. Simply being on twitter will not help you. The only difference is that the medium is now electronic, efficient and nearly instant.
