More than a Feeling
Really tickled with all of the much-deserved positive press that 80Legs has attracted after yesterday’s successful public launch at the DEMO09 conference. (See here, here, and here. And here. And here.) We couldn’t be happier for Shion and Brad and the rest of the 80Legs team. They’ve got a great product, and they’re well-positioned to really dominate the crawling market. (Oh, and they’re from Texas Rice, which is a good thing in my book.) Congrats, guys!
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be talking a lot about the different kinds of semantic apps that Swingly (and its parent company, Language Computer) have built to run on the 80Legs platform. We’re psyched about combining Swingly’s broad-coverage semantic apps with the massive amounts of data that 80Legs provides. It’s a pretty unbeatable combination: 80Legs helps you cast a broad net, while Swingly lets you know exactly what you caught.
While I don’t want to steal any of the 80Legs spotlight, I couldn’t resist telling you a little about the Swingly sentiment analysis app (code name: Positively) that Shion used during his DEMO pitch yesterday.
Like a lot of other sentiment analysis services (such as those provided by ScoutLabs, Jodange, Evri, NStein, or Crimson Hexagon — just to name a few), Positively was designed to help users discover what people think about pretty much any person, product, organization, or service imaginable.
Want to know what people think about the Neill Blomkamp flick, District 9? Lots of sentiment analysis apps can boil down an Internet’s worth of noise to a summary score like this:
and a list of comments (usually tagged as positive or negative ) like this:
- The movie looks great to begin with and this trailer re-enforces we’ll likely get a solid, if not great film out of it. [1]
- “District 9″ seems an oddly misguided sci-fi movie. [2]
- It definitely has the goods: an interesting concept, Blomkamp’s clever filmmaking (the movie begins as a faux-documentary and gradually shifts into a survival tale) and ambitions that far exceed the Hollywood norm.[3]
Positively is different from most sentiment analysis apps in two ways.
First, unlike many other services which rely on large amounts of preprocessed data, Positively runs “live” as part of an 80Legs crawl. Instead of indexing data after it’s become stale, Positively analyzes the sentiments in pages as they’re downloaded. No indexing, no large-scale distributed processing. No headaches. Oh, and you can’t get fresher semantic content.
Second, Positively knows that sometimes you need more than a number. As it crawls, Positively automatically discovers attributes associated with each of the people, products, or services it’s investigating — and then figures out what people think about each of those attributes. Interested in District 9? You might be interested in its:
- plot
- actors
- humor
- cameos
- visual effects
Want to track down information on AT&T cell phones? You might want to know about their:
- battery life
- reception
- chargers
- apps
- features
- size
- display
No, these attributes don’t come from some big, pre-cooked list of things that might (or might not) be relevant for each product category. In order to discover why people feel the way they do, Positively hunts for each of the attributes associated with an item — and then discovers what people actually think about that attribute. Here are a couple of examples for District 9:
Despite its successful launch yesterday, Positively won’t be available to the general public until 80Legs goes live with its App Store later this Fall. We are, however, giving sneak peaks. Want one? Email me at andy@swingly.com.
Oh, and there’s Boston after the jump!
Tags: 80Legs, Sentiment, Swingly