If you sometimes feel that the whole World is spiralling out of control, and that everyone seems down, then now you can really learn how bad things are.
Or how good. Computer expert Jonathan Harris has built a site that searches for the phrase “I am feeling” or “I feel” and then displays them all in a massive user interface, which includes text and images. The website is WeFeelFine.org.
You can view the site by age, gender, age, weather and location of the person leaving the comment. The information is constantly updated.
You can then navigate to the source. For example, I just saw one that said “I feel like deleting my blog post and finding a new theme” and it linked to a nice, personal blog, with music. What is interesting, is that this blog would otherwise never be found, certainly not found in the traditional search engines.
This one really struck a chord with me: “I feel particularly sorry for children who want to learn, but who aren’t naturally academic“. Some are really personal, but of course, still from a public blog, like “I have such mixed feelings in my head and I can’t seem to sort them out. I feel like an emotional basket case. ”
There are so many, millions possibly. Assuming it draws on Twitter and Facebook profiles then there could be hundreds of millions of thoughts being drawn into the machine.
How useful is it? Well, it is a bit of fun for a while. But think of the possibilities. Imagine if you built one for your business. If a business sells a particular product you could set it up to search for people talking about those products. It could be used for anything. It could also be incorporated into a more traditional search engine to spice things up a little. Maybe Google will buy it one day?
See Jonathan Harris’ TED Talk about hos it all works: