The Blog
Now Also Collecting Public Opinions From Facebook
Some weeks ago Facebook announced they have achieved a historic milestone: 500 million users. Not only is that number difficult to visualize, but it also means that Facebook has created a revolution in the way people across the world interact.
If you add 105 million users from Twitter, the numbers are really daunting. That means a quarter of the people using the Internet are Facebook or Twitter users, as it’s calculated that Internet has around 2 billion of users.
That is millions of users sharing part of their lives, worries and more importantly their opinions on what they really care about, regardless place or time.
Now, Imagine the people grouping their opinions about a particular subject. The power is really enormous. That IS a revolution.
Amplicate will always be wherever our users share their public opinions.
We proudly announce that:
Amplicate is now collecting public opinions in real time from the two major social networks: Facebook and Twitter.
And we will continue adding more sources as we go.
We are making your opinion count!
New Search: Now Find More Topics
Our mission is to provide a place for you to comment on any product, service or issue you care about.
And we’ve achieved a lot since we started: there are now more than 245 000 topics available with more than 29 million comments on Amplicate, and we keep on growing fast!
Although, this creates a very interesting challenge: keeping Amplicate simple while allowing you to find what you are looking for.
Today we have good news: We are rolling out an improved search.
With the new search you will now be able to:
- Find more and more relevant topics, categories and users:
See all the opinions on Comcast
What are the latest topics involving vampires?
- Find related content:
Want to know opinions about Canadian Singers ?
What do people think about Social Networks ?
- You can also see the current overall opinion for each of the results:
Which do you think is the most popular Google Product ?
What’s the overall opinion about your favourite Airline ?
A word of warning: We have already spent many hours finding interesting comments on Amplicate. Don’t get addicted :)
USAA’s cease and desist letter
We recently received a Cease and Desist letter from USAA, a financial services company.
The letter implied that Amplicate was not allowed to publish a web page that said USAA sucked and they would take legal action against us if we continued.
It’s a crude threat to try and control the public perception of themselves!
You have a first amendment right to state your opinions and we have a right and a mission to make it heard.
That’s what Amplicate is all about!
We clearly did a good job as USAA heard (but didn’t like it).
So tough luck! We’re not stopping. Continue doing a good job for your customers, and then people won’t say mean things about you.
How we calculate our numbers
One of the common complaints we get is the way we calculate our numbers and what that means. Well, it’s not rocket science at the moment. We add the comments you leave on Amplicate, Twitter and Facebook public streams about the topics you are interested in, and classify on the fly if it’s a raving or ranting message. We are binary. We are only interested in people that feel strongly about a subject - love it or hate it. We don’t attempt to classify the lukewarm or balanced review. It’s very easy if someone uses tags (like #Obama #Fail), relatively simple if there is simple language (like “i couldn’t help but love Inglourious Basterds”) but impossible with sarcasm.
The challenge for us is balancing the false positives vs the false negatives to produce the best statistics. Consequently we will never be perfect, and its doubly difficult when you deal with only 140 characters and the volume of streaming data. However we are:
- Open - you can download every opinion that we have on a topic and make your own conclusion. (We provide RSS feeds on our pages)
- Fair - every opinion has to be attributed, either through Facebook or Twitter account or through email if left directly
- Consistent - everything is treated the same so in most cases the numbers paint a highly accurate relative picture.
And we will improve it - we will soon:
- Look at reach (how many followers / readership does each person providing the opinion have at that time)
- Do a better job of picking up other public streams (next up facebook and blogs)
- Measure relative sentiment (if the average bank has only 20% approval, a bank with 40% is significantly popular)
- Provide time series data (the changes over time)
Hang in there…
Since We Launched
It’s been a wild ride since we opened our service back in August. A lot has changed since then but we’ve kept the same mission: Listen to what people are shouting about publicly and bring it all together to create a collective voice that has a better opportunity to be heard.
Amplicate: Making your opinion count
In just over 6 months, you (over 3 million people) have shared your opinions (over 9 million of them!) on all sorts of different subjects (over 100,000 topics)
Often out of that a common message arises that gets amplified. For instance you are clearly frustrated with Comcast’s service, outraged with Nestle as a corporate citizen, but you love Chatroulette, Nick Clegg and Justin Bieber.
We’re still working to get it totally right, and there’s been legitimate criticism on our categorization, and language processing (not easy with 140 characters). But we figure if we stick to our core principles of being Open, Fair and Consistent - over time we’ll get there.
We have appeared in many of your blogs: Ubuntu Rocks, About Ryanair and Google Buzz and even on Greenpeace’s blog.
We have received threats (mostly from corporate legal and PR departments).
But most of all we have received a lot of love and criticism. We appreciate them both! This is just starting and those opinions help us to provide a better service.
Thanks!
We’re here!
Today we’re starting to roll out Amplicate, a service to collect similar
opinions in one place; making them more likely to be found by people and search engines.
At Amplicate we believe that:
- It’s time to be heard
- We are not just part of the crowd, we are people and our opinions are important
- By working together we can be loud and clear
- Let’s tell them what you think!
And this is just the beginning.
Amplicate, if you want to be heard.
If you have a suggestion we’d love to hear it!
