General Sentiment, Inc. was a

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated continental island in southeastern New York (state), New York state, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. It constitutes a significant share of the New York metropolitan area in both population and land are ...

-based

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

and

news media The news media or news industry are forms of mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public. These include News agency, news agencies, newspapers, news magazines, News broadcasting, news channels etc. History Some of the fir ...

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sc ...

company. The company had patented

text analytics Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from plain text, text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information ...

software to analyze content from more than 60 million sources including

blogs A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

forums Forum or The Forum may refer to: Common uses *Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example * Internet forum, discussion board ...

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and comment sections. General Sentiment's technology analyzed social conversations, themes, news articles, key influencers, marketing campaigns and un-aided brand awareness. The company shut down on June 24, 2015 and laid off all of its employees.

Technology

General Sentiment's core system included a natural language processing engine to analyze text and entity management to track entities. The frontend consisted of depository servers and the Social Intelligence Platform, which hosted a number of applications that are useful for brand measurement. General Sentiment offered a

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

(SaaS)-based solution delivered via the

Amazon Cloud Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

. In December 2010, an official

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

blog implied that the search engine owned General Sentiment’s

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subje ...

. Unique to General Sentiment was a patented ad-value-equivalency metric called Media Value, which placed a dollar value on the media buzz about a specified topic. The technology performed auto-entity extraction to automatically identify and track entities. At one point, General Sentiment tracked more than one billion entities and had some historical data dating back to 2004.

History

The company was cofounded in 2008 by

Steven Skiena Steven Sol Skiena (born January 30, 1961) is a computer scientist and distinguished teaching professor of computer science at Stony Brook University. He is also director of AI Institute at Stony Brook. He was co-founder of General Sentiment, a ...

, a PhD in computer science, and Mark Fasciano, who also founded FatWire. The underlying technology platform, a

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

(NLP) and

system called Lydia, was developed by Dr. Steven Skiena at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public university, public research university in Stony Brook, New York, United States, on Long Island. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is on ...

. It used

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

to process large quantities of data. General Sentiment’s software accurately predicted the winner of the

American Idol ''American Idol'' is an American Music competition, singing competition television series created by Simon Fuller, produced by Fremantle (company), Fremantle North America and 19 Entertainment, and distributed by Fremantle North America. It a ...

Finale in 2011.

Products

General Sentiment offered a variety of products.

Social Intelligence Platform

The Social Intelligence Platform provided customers with tools to solve a variety of problems. Customers used the platform for brand health monitoring, partnership identification, crisis alerts, impact analysis, industry tracking, media suitability analysis and political issue and candidate tracking. Applications available on the Social Intelligence Platform included Power App, Data App and MediaMatch.

Custom Reporting

General Sentiment custom reports provided quarterly, monthly or weekly targeted insights tailored to each customer's need.

Report Series

General Sentiment offered a number of report series in addition to its specialty reports. The STAR GS series was the result of a partnership with the company behind the

Q Score The Q Score (popularly known as Q-Rating) is a measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a brand, celebrity, company, or entertainment product (e.g., television show) used in the United States. The more highly regarded the item or person is, the ...

. Each quarter, General Sentiment released a Global Brands report, which analyzed the brands that had the most significant impact online.{{cite web, url=http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4379/brands-with-most-online-impact-apple-and-google , title=Brands With Most Online Impact: Apple and Google, date=February 4, 2011 , accessdate=August 15, 2011, website=marketingprofs.com

Data API

The General Sentiment Application Programming Interface (API) allowed access to the media measurement indicators that General Sentiment uses for analysis.

References

Software companies based in New York (state) Defunct software companies of the United States