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.
FrowningSmile.com In Their Own Words
“FrowingSmile was created to be the first every automated human happiness measurement system. We query twitter and blogs to get a decent idea of how people are feeling around the world. Our system then generates a report based on this information. Unlike other ways of gathering happiness our system is only ever delayed 1 day at a time, meaning it can reflect depending on world events.”
Why FrowningSmile.com It Might Be A Killer
Such a tool plays out an interesting role, and one that opens the doors to better (or at least more interesting) things to come.
Some Questions About FrowningSmile.com
Which are the happiest countries of the world right now according to the site? 
