In order for Google to predict the future millions of users would have to be accurately able to predict the future, and then use emoticons to reflect their feelings about the prediction.
Emoticons are often used to express feelings about past and present events. If they express feelings about future events, it is speculation. How would you filter out the noise of the past, present, and erroneous predictions of the future?
Cool concept but in practice you would need more information about who uses the emoticon (location, occupation, age, etc). And even then it still might not be feasible (a bunch of people in the financial sector, aged 25-40, NYC sent frowny faces...now what?)
Reminds me of information (prediction) markets where people purchase positions on future events. Turns out it is a more efficient way to tease information out of a group than polling. The ideas is that when there is money at stake people's predictions magically become more accurate.
You bring up some valid points, but I would postulate that people talk about the recent past (i.e. events that affect the future), the present, and the predicted future, far more than they talk about far-past events... especially so if they're tying emotions into this discussion.
The geo-centricity of the data is definitely a problem. Forest fires in California would certainly incur a lot of grief emoticons from that area, and if the algorithm were not geosensitive it would presume there was a spike in global sadness, which would not be the case.
Emoticons are often used to express feelings about past and present events. If they express feelings about future events, it is speculation. How would you filter out the noise of the past, present, and erroneous predictions of the future?
Cool concept but in practice you would need more information about who uses the emoticon (location, occupation, age, etc). And even then it still might not be feasible (a bunch of people in the financial sector, aged 25-40, NYC sent frowny faces...now what?)
Reminds me of information (prediction) markets where people purchase positions on future events. Turns out it is a more efficient way to tease information out of a group than polling. The ideas is that when there is money at stake people's predictions magically become more accurate.