Does Twitter love or hate your website?

Nibbler now tests what people are saying about your website, and whether they’re happy or sad about it.

If you’re President Obama, say, these figures look pretty good:

If you’re the Prime Minister of England, not so much:

This is called sentiment analysis. Essentially what we’re doing is scanning the text of recent tweets referencing a website for positive or negative phrases, like “I love this” or “this sucks”. In reality the rules are a lot more complicated, with some expressions being strongly opinionated, and others being contradictory. We also have to account for the millions of ways you can link to a site, including services like bit.ly.

We’ve just rolled this feature and a few others out for you to play with, including:

• Much better testing of Feeds. We now support more formats (like Atom), analyse the frequency of your posts and score more intelligently.
• Visual explanation of popularity changes. See how popular a site is and how its popularity is changing.
• Badges containing your score, for you to put on your website (scroll to the bottom of a report). These are updated automatically as your score changes.

Social media testing, including sentiment analysis will be featuring in the forthcoming SiteRay 4.

Try this out on your own website – as always we’d love to hear your feedback.