The latest from TechCrunch
- Facebook Prototype Measures Gross National Happiness, Confirms That We Hate Mondays
- Sidebar Will Deliver Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Your Phone
| Facebook Prototype Measures Gross National Happiness, Confirms That We Hate Mondays | Top |
| With over 300 million users and 40 million daily status updates, Facebook has an immense amount of data that could potentially be used to gauge any number of things, from the hottest up-and-coming bands to the most discussed political issues. Earlier this week some of the site’s engineers decided to use this dataset to measure something a bit more fundamental: happiness. Dubbed Gross National Happiness , this new prototype application does its best to determine if Facebook users in the United States are happy or sad. Here’s how the application’s developers describe it: …Grouped together, the status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual! Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment. You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson. The app is part of Facebook’s recently released Prototypes section, which gives Facebook engineers a chance to show off the projects they’ve built before they’re ready for prime-time. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Sidebar Will Deliver Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Your Phone | Top |
| With over 85,000 apps on Apple’s App Store alone, the task to find apps tailored to your needs and likes is daunting. Who wants to sift through that? Sidebar is hoping to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. An app in itself, Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you. Sidebar will recommend daily content to you within the app, including videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later. The startup has also recruited two seasoned professional to help run operations. Patrick Kennedy, a former Sony Pictures Digital exec, joins the company as president and CEO. At Sony, Kennedy oversaw Sony's entry into mobile entertainment and the creation of Sony Pictures Mobile. Sidebar’s new COO is Kieran Hannon, former CMO of online retailer Cooking.com and former marketing EVP at Helio. Kennedy tells us that the app, which is free, will be available on Apple’s App Store and for other smartphones, such as the Blackberry and Android within the next three months. The service around Sidebar is compelling. While there are other ways to find recommended apps, such as the App Store itself, and websites like 16 Apps, it’s great to receive the personalized recommendations on your mobile device. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment