The breakable toy that I am currently working on is a twitter customer sentiment analyser.

It scrapes twitter for tweets relating to a particular organisation, applies a machine learning algorithm to determine if the content of tweet is positive or negative, and generates reports of the sentiment data over time, correlated to dates, events and news feeds.

I’m having lots of fun building this, but I would also like to learn if there is a market for quantified sentiment data. So that I can start to show people what I have in mind I have created a mockup of the simplest and most important report. It shows customer sentiment over time, with important events highlighted. As the user moves their mouse to the right (forward in time) the source data area scrolls up to display the tweets from that time. The tweets are colour coded based on sentiment rating.

After I started working on this project I discovered that a team of students have already built something similar. It is a lot of fun to enter your employers name and see what it says.