We Feel Fine

Ever wanted to know how your neighborhood is feeling?  You must try We Feel Fine.

What the heck is Twitter?

Twitter is a lot like blogging with two major exceptions: 1) You’re limited to 400 characters with no formatting (no bold, italics, etc.), and 2) You can “tweet” from anything that can send messages, including e-mail, cell phone, PDA, or on the Twitter website.  People use it to express themselves throughout the day in a hundred ways.  Individually a “tweet” might seem lame, but all together they create a picture of a person’s life.

We Feel Fine (WFF) pulls people’s messages sent on Twitter that include the word “feel,” so you get messages with permutations of “I feel,” “we feel,” “it feels,” etc.  WFF lets you filter these messages by city, sex, age… even weather!

There’s a few ways to view it all.  Start by clicking the “Open We Feel Fine” box.  When you get in you’ll see a big cloud of dots.  Each dot is a message or “tweet.”  Click on one to read it.  On the bottom left of your screen there’s five options (the type is kinda small, sorry).  Try them out – my favorite is “Murmurs,” which shows messages decending in a continuous train.  ”Mobs” and “Metrics” are also excellent for getting a pulse on your area.

Wrapping Up

It’s hard to find useful information on your community beyond statistics.  We Feel Fine is just one web application that can give you a quick dose.  Whatever you happen to see, it’s usually a healthy reality check for what people really say and feel.