On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 12:02 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]>wrote:
> Man, it is so good to hear this from someone who's actually done it! > The other point, though, is that the "real thing", even traffic / > social network analysis, is compute-resource intensive and requires a > kind of programming knowledge that few have. So if something simple, > like emoticon counting, provides *some* clues about sentiment, it may > be worth doing. I'm not convinced, though, that it is worth doing. > I've been working on commercialising sentiment analysis research, specifically tuned to microblogs and social media, and my investigations - both academic and talking to potential customers - lead me to believe it really is worth doing. Sentiment stuff specifically can be done far more cheaply compute-wise than full-scale semantic understanding of language. The key thing though, to any app developer or startup founder, is *not* to rely on Twitter. We've been asked this several times by investors now: what happens if Twitter fails? Develop stuff that's platform and network agnostic and revel in the fact that there's definitely a ton of interest in the space right now - despite some players being around for 10 years ;) --J
