When you set out to build a product sometimes, things sound good on paper, but the farther you go, the more you realize... what the heck was I thinking? That sort of happened to me with this attempt to build an automatic Twitter well-being app that parsed conversations and rated their well-being content. IN the end, that just wasn't that interesting. Given some law of averages, the number just doesn't vary enough to tell you much.
So we ended up with something quite different... an online quiz that tells you about your own well-being and that of your followers.
Once upon a time, a company named Healthways created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, or WBI, a national survey that provides a comprehensive, real-time look at the public health and well-being in the U.S. The WBI is based on telephone interviews with at least 1,000 U.S. adults each day. Over one million people have been surveyed since the survey launched in 2008, making it the nation’s largest and most comprehensive look at overall well-being.
Although it’s an accurate description of a population's well-being, the WBI was not designed to predict the well-being of me, or you, or any other person on an individual level.
To remedy this, Healthways, the parent company of MeYou Health, partnered with leading behavioral scientists to create an assessment tool for individuals. This tool is called the Well-Being Assessment (WBA), which Healthways administers to employers, health plans and other organizations. MeYou Health has adapted the WBA for online use and calls it the Well-Being Tracker, or WBT.
When we first started on this journey we asked: “Is it possible to find out the well-being of Twitter by capturing the conversations and analyzing the sentiment?”
...or GET YOUR SCORE! and say hi to the well-being bot.