What’s Your Mood ?

Image Courtesy of PCmag.com

YouTube just launched a new feature that allows its viewers to discover and watch videos based on how they make them feel.   YouTube’s new categorizing technique Coined “MoodWall” has about 40,000 videos which have been put into 20 emotion categories.

CnnTech commented on the project that was initially undertaken to address the problem of search content being too general such as “Funny Video”, which can link a viewer to a funny videos but also links to videos that have the word funny in them, which might not actually be “funny”.

When a viewer visits the YouTube page they encounter a random grid of 15 emotions with large thumbnail images but no titles.  They then click an image and are taken to another grid with additional emotions that can be asscoicated with the original mood.

For example, you can click sad and then be taken to a page where you can further choose sad & amazing or sad & beautiful.

“Videos aren’t just about objects and things, they’re about the emotions they invoke,” said software engineer Sanketh Shetty who worked on the project.

Dr. Matsumoto, Humintell’s director notes that emotions and moods are essential to our identity and existence as humans. However, its important to recognize that moods are different than emotions.

He defines emotions as immediate, automatic, and involuntary reactions to events that are important to us. Moods, on the other hand, are states of mind that may make us more predisposed to having a certain emotional response. For example, being in an irritable mood may make a person more predisposed to becoming angry more easily.

So, how do they find out what emotion to assign to which videos?

Well of course they take the feedback from their viewers  via video comments.  YouTube gathered data from the comment threads on videos to identify common words and phrases, detecting what response the video had inspired in its viewers.

The team plans to continue working on their project long after its release taking into account user feedback.

The major question is, Do you really need help deciding what to watch?

Give the Humintell Community your opinion on YouTube’s MoodWall, Does it work for You? 

One thought on “What’s Your Mood ?

  1. Yeah! I totally agree with the post. If your feeling sad, the videos you watch can totally change your mood and make you happy and lively as ever, but still it depends on the type of mood you are in.

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