The Program

Good ol’ Troy, NY.  We just had an ice storm a few days ago and the picture shown here is just an image of what the storm left.  The storm is both beautiful and terrifying.  The tree is completely covered in ice.  The storm also came with 48 hours of no power (this is after several explosions, of what I believe to be transformers).  The whole night and next day I heard falling and snapping tree limbs.  I’m just thankful no tree fell through my window.

Thankfully, I’m home in Rhode Island now.. and far away from any more damage and downed power lines.

For those of you who don’t know, twitter is a web application that allows people to tell any other “followers” what they are doing.  You can update it online, through many client applications, and by cell phone.

I’ve recently started a project (C++) that I hope will analyze twitter’s “tweets” (as they call them), and look for common positive and negative terms.  Through these terms, I want to try to make some sort of graphical display which presents the world’s current mood as a whole (and by the “world”, I mean twitter users of course).

Another goal of mine to be implemented eventually is to add support to learn new words and associate them with positive or negative statements.

I won’t pretend to be perfect in the algorithms I use to analyze the statements received from Twitter’s RSS feed.  Right now, the “analyzer” is fundamentally just a word search (with some fancy stuff added on that looks for derivatives of the words as well, i.e. past-present-future).

I should hopefully complete the project this week (if my school schedule doesn’t dramatically change).