We live in a world of constant monitoring, eat less, eat better, enjoy these specially chosen ads, and mind how you drive. This is the age of big data.
Almost everything about our lifestyles and habits are tracked, for the most part, we just tend to get on with it, living at a pace we (hopefully) enjoy, with lifestyles and habits that make us happy.
But are we truly happy? With Postmood, we can now even track that too with the mood tracker
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Postmood markets itself as ‘Your personal happiness tracker’ and is run by a small UK-based team who are all very experienced in their fields. Together they’ve come up with a site that has the capacity, and utter genius to work on two levels; the relatively simple, and the incredibly complex.
The relatively simple part, is the part that does exactly what it says on the very well presented, clean and simply designed tin; Postmood tracks your mood. How does it do that? I’m glad you asked; it does it simply by analysing the things you post to social media, give it secure permission via facebook and it will track your mood and give you insights into how you’re feeling simple right?
Well yes, but there is more…Much more to it than that.
Postmood uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools that are linked to the IBM Personality Insights Service. Interestingly, it can also link to your personal fitness tracker, allowing you to correlate your physical activity directly to the way it might be making you feel. Letting you see what works, and what doesn’t, and helping you to build up a fitness regime that doesn’t just keep you fit, but keeps you happy. There is depth here, real depth, and access to information about yourself which over time, can build up fascinating and very useful insights into you and how you are, physically and emotionally.
This combined information on a large scale, is potentially big. Think about world events, politics, health and fitness trends and how they affect us. How useful might Postmood’s data be regarding those things? There is the potential to run reports and studies on human emotion, happiness, personalities and ever-changing moods and opinions. Thinking about that, you start to realise that Postmood is not just another site, not just another fad. They are on to something here and the possibilities are amazing, not just for the single user but for society, for marketing, even for health and social studies.
With the potential for such deep insight into both the individual, and the larger world, comes the inevitable concern about privacy, and that is something that Postmood go to great lengths to address on their site. They state specifically that no identifying data is included in any of their stored information. So, for example; we could see how Manchester feels about their latest gym, or we could see how California feels about their latest health food restaurant, but that data is researched on a specific server which is never given access to personal information or other timeline posts, it’s all in the numbers and data, nothing else.
It will be fascinating to see how Postmood evolves and grows over the coming years, with so much potential for the individual and society as a whole; it is difficult to see how they can fail.
