Nibbler now tests what people are saying about your website, and whether they’re happy or sad about it.
If you’re President Obama, say, these figures look pretty good:
If you’re the Prime Minister of England, not so much:
This is called sentiment analysis. Essentially what we’re doing is scanning the text of recent tweets referencing a website for positive or negative phrases, like “I love this” or “this sucks”. In reality the rules are a lot more complicated, with some expressions being strongly opinionated, and others being contradictory. We also have to account for the millions of ways you can link to a site, including services like bit.ly.
We’ve just rolled this feature and a few others out for you to play with, including:
- Much better testing of Feeds. We now support more formats (like Atom), analyse the frequency of your posts and score more intelligently.
- Visual explanation of popularity changes. See how popular a site is and how its popularity is changing.
- Badges containing your score, for you to put on your website (scroll to the bottom of a report). These are updated automatically as your score changes.
Social media testing, including sentiment analysis will be featuring in the forthcoming SiteRay 4.
Try this out on your own website – as always we’d love to hear your feedback.
Originally written by Oliver Emberton for the Nibbler blog
