A friend recently admitted a favorite past time of his - watching plane crashes on YouTube. Planes crashing, helicopters twirling out of control, boats sinking - all are fair game. For a lot of people, this has been the story of the iPad over the past few days. While some of us take the higher ground, others revel in off-color jokes and nitpicking the different ways the iPad will be Apple's biggest mistake ever.
TweetFeel, a sentiment analysis tool that uses tweets as its data set, offers us a snapshot of this darker side of the iPad.
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According to an email from Andres Burgos, the project lead for TweetFeel, the company collected almost a half a million tweets since Steve Jobs took the stage on Wednesday, "cleaned the hell out of them and scored about 40,000" and found an overall positive sentiment, hovering at around 60%. But this isn't the fun part. Nobody wants to watch people gush, so let's take a look at how that other 40% breaks down.
Some good news for Apple might be that a solid 38% of the negative has only to do with making fun of the name "iPad", something even potential customers might find themselves doing because it's just too easy.
After that, however, the biggest section of tweets complained that the iPad is merely a larger version of the iTouch or iPod. This could be a bit more serious, as it shows that people don't see the iPad as fulfilling a need. From here, we have the final 35%, with the lack of a camera and flash running neck in neck. The inability to multitask and potential network problems round up the Twitterverse's displeasure with the device.
We think it's this last 35% that really has some substance, as we've seen a number of articles focusing on these very points.
When it comes to that positive side, that 60% majority, however, Burgos said the sentiment becomes quite simple and the news for Apple is certainly good.
"The positive tweets are mostly folks saying things like 'It's awesome' [and] 'I want one'," he wrote. "When looking at Apple products, the positive responses are usually very 'Koolaid-esque' meaning they don't really say why they like it but just that they do..and they want."
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A regional development firm in the U.K. is the first to announce a development fund for the Apple iPad, offering up to £40,000 ($64,500) for iPad application ideas. The introduction of this fund comes less than twenty-four hours after Apple's chief exec Steve Jobs demoed the the company's highly anticipated touchscreen tablet computer on stage at an event in San Francisco. Although this fund is limited to developers in the U.K., there's little doubt that this firm will soon be one of many offering similar incentives to developers in order to encourage the creation of an entirely new ecosystem of applications tailored specifically for this unique handheld device.