FeelPress: A Social App from Japan for Stuff That Matters to You

FeelPress is a fun social sharing app from Japan-based imonomi inc which launches today. It’s a clever service that’s dedicated to communicating and journaling a wide range of your emotions. The start screen gives you two options: choose to share how you feel (see below, right), or choose to share your impression of something — both from a preset list of emotions or feelings. What you share then goes to a timeline, and you can also follow the feelings in the public stream, or those of your friends.

In addition to sharing your feelings, you can attach photos to your post, mark a location, and write a comment. FeelPress has done a nice job with the privacy settings, with icons representing ’locked,’ ’friends,’ and ’public’ depending on how visible you want your message to be. As with many apps like this, you also have the option to connect to Facebook and Twitter for automatic sharing to those networks, or to scan and see how many of your friends are on FeelPress.

I asked the founder and CEO, Daisuke Komatsu, what exactly prompted him to create such an application. And while I’m usually pretty selective about which apps and social sites I’ll work into my digital life, his response makes a pretty good case for using something like FeelPress:

In the end of 2011, I was looking back at the past year noticing that I didn’t remember any moments that I really laughed my ass off. Even more surprisingly, I could only remember one touching moment. And I thought this was a very sad thing. I use Facebook and I tweet but it was all about what I did. This made me think about what kind of information is important for me to log.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this application is its analytics section, which shows monthly and all-time aggregates of your “feel count.” It presents a handy bar chart (see picture on the right) showing the most frequent feelings, and another chart that shows the days of the week when you feel them. For folks who are interested to track how they feel or see which days make them happiest, this is a fun way to do that.

So how is FeelPress going to make money? Daisuke cites an advertising model as one possible option:

At this moment users can only feel and post text, photos, and places. In the beginning of 2013. We will expand our service and make it easy to tag feelings to musics, dvds, books and any other products on Amazon. By doing this we will recommend to users products that will match their feelings. For example, right after you post an ‘angry,’ we will recommend the best relaxing songs based on other music that might make you relax.