Continuing from the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago the rampant march of “emotional data” continues.

Path, the ‘limited’ social network that only allows you to keep 50 contacts in your network at any given time, have updated their app to version 1.3. The latest edition lets users tag posts with one of five smiley faces to denote how they feel about the image (or video since Path 1.2). Users get to choose from happiness, laughter, surprise, sadness or love. To get an overall picture of how much a photo is liked it’s a great update, but the lack of choice might render the system a little redundant. Time will tell. It’s certainly interesting to see emotional context being used in a mainstream and well-funded social application.

Another new start-up using emotional context data for social software is the rather odd and left-field “She Chooses“. This one is aimed squarely at the female gender as it markets itself as;

She Chooses™ is the social network application that taps the power of feelings to assist women in making choices.

The site is similar in many ways to Twitter. You post updates that are tagged as questions, updates or tools, and other users reply or empathize (which appears to be the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like”). The app’s selling point appears to be something that the creators have deigned to call “The Tool”. It’s an emotionally sensitive “expert system” where you choose the way you feel and what you’re after and it returns a list of people’s updates who might assist you. I’m not sure how useful it’ll be.

My only reservation about “She Chooses” is the “I am a woman” checkbox on the registration page. I ticked it, but I suspect you’ll be kicked out if you don’t. That’d be a step backwards in terms of equality if you are. Who knows? It’s a long way from launching; perhaps that’s just an alpha software quirk.