Facebook Now Measuring Our Happiness

Facebook has been working on a number of side projects over the past couple years which involve measuring the sentiment of users on the site. The company’s latest project, first announced yesterday afternoon, is the United States Gross National Happiness index. The newly launched tool polls users’ status updates within the United States and then measures their sentiment to determine the collective happiness. While I’m still a little bit cynical of sentiment analysis, there are some definite correlations between holidays and positive updates on Facebook.