Contribute to a worldwide 'mood diary' with Moodoo

Moodoo is a new iOS app from Urban Design. It's available now as a free download from the App Store, though the store description suggests that it will become a paid app before long. Moodoo is a "mood diary" app that allows users to record the way they are feeling at any given moment, along with the time, date, weather conditions, temperature and moon phase. There are eight different moods that can be chosen -- love, happy, hopeful, bored, unhappy, scared, anxious and worried, upset and angry, or depressed. Each mood has an appropriate color code assigned to it -- depressed is black, for example, while angry is red and in love is pink. Once the user has selected a mood for themselves, they can record it in their diary with a simple tap of the "add" button. It can then optionally be shared on Facebook and/or Twitter if desired, and it is also recorded anonymously on Moodoo's servers, with the user's location information attached. The user may then not change their mood until at least five minutes has elapsed. Once an entry has been recorded, it can be customized if desired. The default "how I am feeling" text may be replaced completely with a message of up to 30 characters, though the color-coding and mood is still recorded in its original form. The user may also record up to 200 characters of text about why they think they are feeling the way they are, and attach a photograph either taken "live" or imported from the device's photo library. From the diary view, the user can see at a glance all of the diary entries they have recorded. A grid-view calendar allows the user to jump straight to a specific day and see how they were feeling then, and the time, date, weather and moon phase are all prominently displayed on each entry for users to analyze any trends there might be in their moods according to environmental conditions. The other part of the app allows users to scroll around a map of the world and take the pulse of any given location. Upon choosing (or searching for) a location, the user may see statistics for how any Moodoo users in the area are feeling at any given moment. This information is displayed as a pie chart, and each segment may be displayed with either a percentage figure or an exact number of people who responded with that particular mood. The latter option was perhaps a bad idea, as it shows just how few people are actually using Moodoo at present -- though if nothing else, it allows users to make a good estimate of how accurate and representative the sample they are viewing will be. Moodoo's mood diary system works well, and is a proven method used by therapists to help patients analyze their moods and the things that might be causing them. By getting the patient into a routine of reflecting on their own mood and why they might be feeling that way, it's possible to uncover trends and other factors that might be influencing the way the patient is feeling. In this sense, Moodoo is potentially a valuable resource for those who respond well to this kind of therapy. The location-aware anonymous survey of mood data is potentially interesting, but at present there are far too few people using it to make it particularly worthwhile or accurate. This will hopefully change over time as more users check out the app for themselves, but at the time of writing there's not a great deal of value in the data, save to say that a significant proportion of the few people who have downloaded and tried the app so far are either bored or depressed, regardless of where in the world they are. Moodoo is a rather specialist app that might struggle to gain a foothold in the crowded marketplace of the App Store, but for those who might find mood tracking a helpful form of self-reflection, this is a good app with which to do it -- it's simple to use, well-designed and is something that can easily be fit into a busy routine. You can follow Moodoo's progress with AppData, our tracking service for mobile and social apps and developers.

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Contribute to a worldwide 'mood diary' with Moodoo

Pete Davison

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Pete Davison