I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment.

My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:

and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as:

which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release.

I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are:

1. There  is no market for this tool
2. There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.