Check out the new slideshow widget features. You can now preselect photos and quotes you want to add to the widget and save you widget look-and-feel in Cuesense. Go to Account>Widgets and create a new slideshow. The Edit Photos and Edit Quotes links will be enabled when you choose the Preselected option on the widget front page.

Photos can be added from Flickr via tag search. You can also import an entire Flickr photoset. Choose a sensible photo size that you want to embed in your slideshow, as large photos will take longer to download. Generally, get the size that does now exceed the dimensions of your widget.

Quote selection works the same way, only here you search by quote intensity score (its expressiveness), emotional orientation (positive, negative, ambiguous/opinion) and date.

Move photos and quotes up and down to perfect the flow and check the results in Preview. When you are done, copy the embed code then into your site.

So you just saw a movie and have something to say about it. Or you had an idea about a Kindle feature and need to share it with the world.
What if someone you know (or, even better, you don’t know) had the same idea? If you follow a lot of tweeps or blogs, it’s often difficult to find the gold nuggets in the stream.
We think Cuesense is good at starting conversations, because we crunch a lot of tweets and blogs and can generally figure out who is talking about what and how. And our busy text crunchers in our data centers are more than happy to work through the night to bring you the news.
So, to find shared ideas in your lists of friends or customers, use the News River.

Cuesense gets more interesting when you add your Twitter following and favorite blogs to your subscriptions. You can tell Cuesense which services you are already using on the Account>My Services page and we will import your favorite feeds and start crunching them for gold nuggets of knowledge.

You can also add individual feeds on the Account>Subscriptions page. Click on the Add link and enter the service type and publisher (a nickname, a URL or an email, depending on the service).

We just introduced a new feature, the News River, which will help you better understanding the top trending topics on the web. On the News River you will find a list of top topics, and each topic section will group emotions, opinions, and links relevant to that topic. Opinions are divided into three tabs according to their valence, or emotional orientation.

Hover over an emotion and you will get a preview of the web resource.

Nifty, eh?

A new feature, the Cuesense widget, allows embedding a dynamic slideshow into any web site and showing opinions and photos together with a kinetic soundtrack. You’ve always wanted to use social media to promote your event or brand on your web site? The Cuesense widget can help you do that.
Click the Play button inside the widget on the Home page or on any Topic Profile page. In the menu bar find the “SHARE” button and click on it. The Widget Share page opens, where you can enter the settings for your own slideshow.

The Preview button will start the slideshow with the settings you used above. If you like the slideshow, cut and paste the embed code into your website.

That’s all!

Cuesense just got a major upgrade. From now on all links and text blurbs are analyzed using advanced sentiment extraction techniques and we will be able to sense and extract topics and opinions in English text. If you are interested what your customers or friends think about a topic, person or brand, Cuesense will be able to help.
The new feature grades opinions in 11 emotional dimensions such as anger and surprise. These dimensions are the results of academic research in the area of human psychology:

• Acceptance
• Anger
• Anticipation
• Disgust
• Fear
• Guilt
• Interest
• Joy
• Sadness
• Shame
• Surprise

At the core of this new major feature is a natural language processor that can determine the grammatical structure of a sentence, paragraph, and the entire text.
But this is just the beginning. Here is a list of textual cues we use to evaluate and grade a phase:

• Abbreviations: words like “awol”, “b4”, “thx”
• Degree adverbs: words like “truly”, “exclusively”
• Emoticons: “:D” ,  “:-(“
• Idioms: phrases like “stand out”, “a cut below”
• Interjections: words like “hola”, “ta ta”
• Capitalization: e.g. “GREAT”
• Negations: words like “never” or “neither”
• Prefixes: parts of words like “hyper-“ and “under-“
• Quality words: e.g. “correct” and “elegant”
• Emotion words: e.g. “cranky” and “merry”

As you can see, Cuesense can understand informal text too, which comes especially handy in evaluating tweets and blog comments.
Early on we rejected the approach of simply grading an entire text article as positive or negative. Too often an article contains areas with both positive and negative commentary. Instead, Cuesense searches for small chunks of text with the strongest emotions or representing the topic of the article the best. These chunks, or as we call them, opinions, will be used by Cuesense in other parts of the service in features we will release very soon.

If you are around town today, check out the Seattle 2.0 Awards event at the Pacific Science Center, organized by Marcelo Calbucci. Cuesense will be in the demo pit.

I demoed Cuesense at the nPost demo event on the 31st of March, together with 4 other awesome startups. The Columbia City Theater, our venue, certainly has its charms (see @bmw’s shot below). I hope to be back soon, this time for a live show or a performance.

Cuesense was selected to present at the inaugural Northwest Entrepreneur Network First Look Forum, and let me tell you, we were in good company! My personal favorites were Hydrovolts, inventors of a miniature power turbine that can generate electricity practically in any water stream, and Redmond Experimental, builders of “Lego for Electronics” kits teaching young kids the awesomeness of resistors, transistors, and electronic boards.

You just joined a talk-of-the-town web service and invited a few of your friends to join it too. Some of them responded and invited their friends in turn. Soon you are dodging email invitations left and right. Your friendly neighborhood web service just does not realize that sending out mass invitations to friends is passé. So, how do you allow people who you already know to connect with you without all this invite spam? You want to be found by your friends when they join the service, and you want it to be done automatically. The problem is that names are not unique and no serious web service wants to compromise your online privacy by asking for your social security number. So how do you increase the chances of people finding you on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or any other new web service?

The answer is storing your email addresses in your profile. Email addresses do the trick as they are uniquely attached to a person and are usually saved in address books of your friends. If a web service wants to help you connect with people you already know, it usually asks you to enter an email address you use to communicate with your friends. When your friend joins the service and connects with his address book, the web service downloads the address book and compares these addresses with the addresses of the users of the service, establishing a match. Problem solved.

What about privacy, you ask? Most services have privacy policies that prohibit sharing of email addresses with any third party without your explicit permission. Read the privacy policy to make sure that that’s the case. If the policy looks unreadable or too confusing, that’s a sign that the service is fishy or not serious about it.

Furthermore, the computer engineers came up with a solution to safely comparing email addresses between two web services (e.g. Cuesense and Facebook) without exchanging real email addresses. Instead, these web services essentially encrypt the addresses and compare what is called a “hash”. That’s how Facebook Connect works, and it has worked pretty well since its introduction.

So, all of you social sharers and networkers out there, go and add your main email addresses to your Facebook and other profiles. You’ll help the world get rid of the invite spam and find more of your friends in the services you use.