Emotions are everywhere you look on the Web. They're bursting from blogs, coursing through comments, and flooding forums the world over. An with the rise of microblogging apps like Twitter and Tumblr, more people are wearing their hearts on their homepages, so to speak, than ever before. But on the whole is the Internet happy or sad, thoughtful or apathetic, aggravated or relaxed?
There are, of course, ways to tell. So with that in mind, we thought it was high time we brought you a list of the best places you can go to see how the world is feeling (the headline text for each app is a link to it). We're just touchy-feely like that...
]]> 1. Benrikland
Few of the entries here will be practical necessities in your digital life. No one knows this better than the tongue-in-cheek creators of Benrikland. But that's just why this site is so addictive. It's worth browsing for its many amusing features, but Benrikland's mood chart and Love Hit Parade are particularly amusing. In the site's own words, "Benrik's World Mood Chart collates thousands of individual moods a day, providing an accurate reflection of the World Mood. You can enter your mood below daily to participate in this valuable global exercise." The Love Hit Parade allows bloggers to either declare themselves in love, or meet in the 'singles bar', and assign each other love hearts and log their relationship ups and downs.
2. WeFeelFine
This year's worthy Webby Award Winner WeFeelFine is an exercise in utter simplicity yet remarkable complexity. It's as rich an experience as you want it to be. WFF trawls the web for bloggers' comments and picks out posts that include "I feel" or "I am feeling." Then the information that's contained in those posts are referenced for location, author, time and weather, and used to create a startlingly organic and visually inviting world. The authors have documented their methodology painstakingly and offer an API for others to mash up their data. The same team also gives us Lovelines, which uses the mood-parsing kit from We Feel Fine, but looks for different key phrases.
3. Moodviews
Brilliant geekery here from the University of Amsterdam. It's been going a bit longer than We Feel Fine, but essentially uses the same blogospheric data to fill its graphs and lists. This is a statistics lovers' delight, and you can easily get lost in pages devoted to reactions to global events, such as Valentines Day or the Virginia Tech shootings. Badges are available to stick on your blog too, but the data the site receives is from LiveJournal users only.
4. MoodMill
A newbie in this crowd, MoodMill is more of a Twitter hybrid than a truly new experience. Still, it's a bit of fun for the emoticon addicts out there and does well what it is made to do. It's well-designed and already has a Firefox Extension and Wordpress Plugin to augment the core service. One to watch.
5. StateOfBrain
The aptly named StateOfBrain is a Digg-alike social news service that hooks emotional ratings to the submitted link. The rating system is a bit confounding at first, bit it's a novel approach and worth checking out. But those with refined visual palettes beware... it's an aesthete's nightmare.
6. Moodjam
If Piet Mondrian was alive today, and he was fired up about programming, we're fairly certain he would have created Moodjam. It's another mood logging device, but unusually in this space, it's got its own Google Gadget. Visually, Moodjam sports some hot neoplastic style (okay, maybe it's more like a TV test pattern, but regardless, it is rather pretty to look at).
7. Moodstats
Moodstats
is a desktop application that acts as a hi-fi equalizer for your soul. Well, it's not quite that amazing, but it tracks more than just your mood. It diarizes your stress levels, exercise regimen, and even how many emails you send a day. It then compares your stats with other users of the application. Pretty nifty stuff. We wonder if psychologists are going to jump on the bandwagon and start integrating it in their therapy sessions...
8. Wordpress Mood Visualizer Plugin
A keen student invented this dashing blog badge that allows users to blend visual panels into an approximation of how they're feeling at any given time. The Visualizer plugin lets your users create a 100x100 visual comment on your blog to approximate their mood while reading your post. If there are more than two visual comments, they're assembled into a mosaic blog badge that you can use to display the mood of your post as perceived by your readers.
9. Burst Labs
Mood music for the wired generation. Burst Labs, which is a music production and licensing firm, lets users browse their catalog by the mood of the music instead of the traditional directory-trawling tedium. This is probably very helpful to music supervisors who need to match music to movie scenes or commercials. An equally useful and similar service that you might want to check out is Musicovery, which matches you with music based on mood, genre, and year (for example, inputting energetic/positive funk from the 2000s pointed me to the ever-upbeat Maceo Parker).
10. Facebook Mood
Because it's Facebook Week here on Read/WriteWeb, we'd be remiss not to point out Facebook's Mood application by James Yu, which allows users to post their moods to their profile in a similar way as some of the sites listed above. It's very similar to the built-in Status app, but is focused specifically on moods and uses icons to represent each mood.
Have we missed out on your favourite mood-tracking app? Let us know in the comments. [Bonus points for whoever can identify the picture to right of this post's intro. -- Ed.]
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