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Comment by jiganti | Hacker News Reader

The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why. Since people love posting their thoughts on twitter, we imagined there would be a market for those who want to let everyone know what's causing their emotions.

From the about page:

Moodstir is where you give the world a snapshot of your emotions. Tell the world you're [frustrated] because of [traffic], or search [Jersey Shore] to see the variety of moods the popular TV show causes people to share.

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>The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why.

Why, exactly, can't we just use Twitter, or G+ or FB to post our mood? There's no value-add here; your service is just trying to further divide your target users' attention and splinter their social network.

Quite aside from the value-add problem is the value proposition itself: what on earth do I provide by sharing my mood with friends and what do I gain by moodstalking them?

Say you had a great experience at a coffee shop- you post [satisfied] towards [Velo Rouge Cafe]. If enough people do this, anyone who wants a quick snapshot of what people have experienced in Velo Rouge might just search for them on Moodstir. If there are a lot of [satisfied] emotions posted, or a lot of [frustrated] ones, it imply certain things about the cafe. Different than a Yelp review site, in that it takes the aggregate feelings of all users, rather than a simple X/5 star system, which is a more limited glimpse into peoples' experiences.

I get it, and dig it.

Aggregating moods would be useful on a site such as Amazon, where, depending on the technical level of the product, reviews range from sharp and intelligent to blunt and kneejerk. Having access to sentiment analysis would help consumers to quickly see whether or not the product/service being 'mood reviewed' solves their problem or not.

Written reviews are full of conjecture and anecdotes, 5-star gradings may as well not exist for 2-4 stars, so mood is another great metric to add to these tools.

I still don't get it: moodstir has no context such as you describe. There's no reason I'd go there to post cafe reviews nor would I visit the site expecting to find such. Near as I can tell what you have here is a micro-blogging app whose functionality is entirely dominated by existing services.

I'm not trying to troll here: I genuinely think it's important for you to have convincing responses to this kind of critique.

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