Twitrratr is a StartupWeekend project that measures public opinion on Twitter. It allows you to measure general opinions on a topic by entering a keyword and cross-checking it against a list of pre-compiled adjectives. There are lists for both positive and negative adjectives; anything that doesn’t match falls in the neutral category.

The real motivation behind the project was to determine Twitter opinion of both candidates in the 2008 US Presidential Election. Since then, it’s spread to literally any keyword you can think of that has been mentioned on Twitter. More tweets on a keyword leads to greater accuracy, as always.

The Good

Twittrratr does a pretty good job of measuring positive opinion. The adjective list for positive opinions works better than the negative opinions list does. It’s also pretty interesting to quantify opinion into categories to see how people feel about something. It’s generally fairly accurate, but does suffer from some glaring issues with successfully determining opinion.

The Bad

The keyword lists that drive the entire categorization of tweets is fundamentally flawed. It’s nearly impossible to determine a person’s opinion based on keywords. For instance, when searching for mint.com, you’ll find that @Teanna said “Mint.com is pretty awesome.”. Somehow, this got lumped into the neutral category. This is just one case of many instances. Another shining example comes from @integrateit, who said:

From Bitbucket Mint vs. Quicken, and the importance of a good UI: Mint.com’s Aaron P.. http://tinyurl.com/69ydpn

This user didn’t say that Mint.com is good, he just mentions the word good in reference to a UI design.

The Verdict

I think Twitrratr is, at the very least, a good way to find out what users are saying about your brand by attempting to quantify their tweets into categories. It’s not a very mature system and could be improved using better algorithms or analyzing tweets in more depth. Even though it’s not completely accurate, it’s still a fun tool to check out every once in a while.

Update: Twitrratr has won the Mashup of the Day Award for November 13, 2008.