Emotion Care Services with Facebook Wall Messages

With the popularity of Web 2.0, social networks have become an important channel for people to keep in contact. It is common to have hundreds of friends for a user on Face book. Thus it is quite difficult for the user to keep track on all friends´ emotion and to express his/her care to them in a timely manner, which we think is essential in keeping the friendship. The Wall on Facebook includes a user´s personal posts that reveal his/her emotion and is a good source for friends to show their care. However, it also contains messages from friends and applications. In the proposed emotion care services, the system filters Wall messages from all friend accounts first. The results are posts by friends and they are analyzed for emotional states, respectively. Then the emotional states are transformed into an attention index. All friends are then ranked by their attention indices. The user can choose the top-ranked friends to read corresponding posts. He/she can also respond with his/her care instantly via follow-up posts. The application named Friends_Smile has been developed and published on Face book.