Explore Human Emotion with the We Feel Fine Web Application

When Johnathan Harris and Sep Kamvar released their social experiment We Feel Fine in 2005 they gave the world a truly one of a kind application that measures the pulse of human emotion expressed via blogs. We Feel Fine is a stunning visual aggregator that searches blog posts that contain the phrases "I Feel" and "I am Feeling" and reports back the emotions that those writers have expressed. The 200 most common feelings are used in the search process. It's a complex application that takes data from LiveJournal, Myspace, Google, Blogger, Technorati, and Flickr. It's both fun to use and insightful. Impressive is an understatement.

When a person first jumps onto We Feel Fine the application is a visual mess of jumping colored dots. Clicking on one of the dots will reveal an emotion that was composed within the past several hours. Further exploration will reveal the exact time it was written and a link will be provided to the full blog post. My first couple clicks resulted in emotions as simple as "I feel like having pizza is a good idea tonight" to deeper material such as "I ended up feeling under appreciated and overworked." The range of emotions is staggering. From the sites dashbound a user choose how they want to view the excerpts. Choices include a live flowing stream, a collection of photos, or a ranking of popular emotions.

One of the more impressive features of the application is in its ability to organize the massive amount of data. The task is a large one considering the site receives anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 feeelings per day and archives them from present day all the way back to the sites original creation. It's rather easy to narrow in on certain feelings. Choosing ambitious will results in a plethora of choices, but those particular emotions can be analyzed further by choosing the gender of the writer, an age bracket, the writers location, or even the weather in that particular location. If I wanted to I could find male bloggers, who are feeling acknowledged, who live in New York City, and are between the age of 30 and 40. The user experience is surreal.

We Feel Fine is the result of a couple of passionate creators who want to change the way others look at data and emotions. On the website it's expressed that "This is a project about people. Blogs are just the medium." The app is free and there is no advertising on the website. The only income source for the creators is a book that chronicles observations from the experiment. The mission statement outlined on the website gives off the impression that We Feel Fine is all about creativity, sharing, data collection, and the exploration of human emotion. It's existence and mission is admirable.