3/17/13 - Stewart's analysis of tweetfeel

I plugged a few queries into the website tweetfeel, and achieved interesting results. The first thing I plugged into the site was the phrase 'charter school'. 75% of tweets that are somehow related to the phrase 'charter school' were negative, with 6 positive tweets about the phrase 'charter school' and 18 negative tweets about the phrase 'charter school'. The second thing I searched on tweetfeel was the phrase 'school'. This yielded much more positive results, with 50% of the results positive and 50% negative. I recorded the data at 100 tweets and stopped counting beyond that. When I searched the phrase 'public school' the tweets stayed at about 65% negative results, factoring in exactly 100 tweets. When all tweets about 'public school' were calculated the data was at 67% negative tweets about 'public school'. When I entered the query 'private school' I found the most negative response, with 70% negative tweets and 30% positive tweets.  The last phrase I entered on tweetfeel was the phrase 'summer'. I assumed that because there were so many negative tweets about school there would be more positive tweets about summer. I was wrong though. Counting 50 tweets, there was another 50/50 split between positive and negative. It seems as though Twitter just serves as a platform for complaining no matter what the topic is, but to be fair to Twitter users, the few results I gathered from my tweetfeel search seemed to have been written during the summer based on the amount of complaining about summer (too hot, nothing to do, etc.) and I figure most people, especially students, would have mostly positive things to say about summer during the school year.

I ended up doing one more tweetfeel search, for the purpose of testing how this platform could be immensely helpful for business owners, celebrities, and musicians in understanding how the public receives their products. I searched 'samsung' and the results were mostly positive with 54% positive tweets about samsung. I think this is actually a pretty fair rating on the site when you factor in spam, people complaining about problems all tech products would have, and when you factor in the high amount of negativity Twitter users seem to have. One thing I would do to make tweetfeel more reliable for business owners and other people who could use feedback on their products, would be to add search parameters. In the case of a musician, they could enter the release date of their new music video or album and look through the search results to gauge how the public receives their work. Admittedly I don't know how this website works, so I can't exactly spell out how this feature could be implemented and if it is even possible.