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Can sentiment analysis be as simple as installing a browser plug-in and scrolling down a screen? You bet, and you might want to check out the latest from ViralHeat. In a matter of minutes, you too can be getting in touch with your feelings, or at least the feelings of those folks that you correspond with on Twitter. The tool has been updated to analyze Facebook's fan pages, timeline, news feed and comments.

If you use tools such as Radian6 to analyze how the social Web is talking about your company, brands or products, perhaps it might be time to take a look at what you can get for free from the competition ViralHeat. Starting today, they will offer a free developer account good for up to 5,000 connections from their site here.

Social CRM, as a concept, has been around for five or six years now, according to Paul Greenberg and Estaban Kolsky, two analysts interviewed on the subject by Dennis Howlett. But we're only just now starting to understand the concept, and it may be several years before we have any real success stories in the area. Never the less, we can already learn a few lessons from the pioneers of social CRM.

Yesterday SMART@znmeb (SMART stands for "social media analytics research toolkit"), a SUSE Linux appliance created by Ed Borasky, added sentiment analysis to its set of features. The toolkit now includes texttir, a sentiment analysis package created in the statistical programming language R. SMART@znmeb includes other open source tools that include data mining, dashboarding and data visualization.

Borasky says textir is the first open source sentiment analysis library he's found that he thinks may actually work. "Most of the vendors sell a sentiment analysis tool of some kind or another, and the customers that have tested multiple tools spend a lot of time trying to figure out why they give different answers," he says. He also cautions that sentiment analysis is vulnerable to spam and other gaming tactics and requires a large investment in hardware.

The TweetSentiments.com API is now open to any developer interested in using Twitter for sentiment analysis. Brand monitoring is the most obvious application, but I'm sure a few of you will come up with more creative uses for the API. So far, only three calls are available. More information on how to use the API is available here.

TweetSentiments.com uses a machine learning method called support vector machines (SVM) to analyze sentiment on tweets, topics and users. It's available as either a service or as a stand-alone application that runs behind the firewall.

These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

A friend recently admitted a favorite past time of his - watching plane crashes on YouTube. Planes crashing, helicopters twirling out of control, boats sinking - all are fair game. For a lot of people, this has been the story of the iPad over the past few days. While some of us take the higher ground, others revel in off-color jokes and nitpicking the different ways the iPad will be Apple's biggest mistake ever.

TweetFeel, a sentiment analysis tool that uses tweets as its data set, offers us a snapshot of this darker side of the iPad.

Facebook announced this afternoon that it is tracking what it calls its version of Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. It's very interesting to see how people feel about various world events that Facebook has cross referenced - US users are more happy on Thanksgiving than on Christmas, for example.

The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.

What's the easiest travel website? The best test prep software? The most powerful and secure online payment processor? How would you find the answers to these questions, at least from the perspective of your online peers?

RankSpeed is a sentiment-based search engine. It tracks mentions of websites and web-based services in blogs and on Twitter, then ranks their search results based on sentiment analysis.