FrowningSmile.com - Measuring Global Happiness

If we had to look online for an accurate representation of the way the people of the world feel right now, we won’t have to go very far or sit down for some hours to think where we should look. The answer is completely obvious: social media.

Facebook has a userbase that amounts to more than 300 million individuals all over the world. There are 8 million Twitter users. These numbers speak for themselves.



What this new company does is to query both Twitter and blogs in order to arrive at some sort of conclusion regarding how happy the people of the world are. The results are presented as numeric percentages that split themselves between “Happier” and “Sad”, and the homepage shows you the happiest countries all over the world. A nice touch is that you can actually see news items that go some way into explaining why sudden shifts in mood take place. This way, you know you can attribute a sudden turn for the better to an incredible sports win, and understand that a downturn was caused by something like a massive accident that meant a lot of casualties.

It is good to see the emergence of original startups. Sociologists are going to have a field day with something like this, whereas the rest of us can see social data being put to an interesting (and inspiring) use for a change.