Looking for somewhere to rant or rave online? Do you need a safe haven for airing your (brutally) honest opinions on a range of concepts, people, places and things? Feel the need to tell the world how much you worship Marmite? Well look no further, as Amplicate may just be for you. It’s the place to share your loves and hates online, along with around 14 million other people, according to the site’s own figures. I stumbled upon this site very recently, whilst  trolling the Web for evidence of frustrated customers of a certain local parcel service. The site invites people to ‘say it as it is’, whilst promising ‘no sanitizing (of) results for corporate clients’. Interesting, I thought, and it didn’t take me long to find said evidence. There’s also a real-time feed of what people love and hate, and as I write this, smoking and algebra are doing very poorly.

According to its 2010 annual review of ‘most-loved topics’ on social media, Adam Lambert was no. 1 in the people category, whilst spiders and hospitals came first and second respectively, in the most-hated category. Hmm.

Clearly, a topic needs to have built some critical mass before it even registers on Amplicate’s radar. As a Web beach-comber, I will definitely refer to the site now that I know of its existence. As a PR person, I might consider using it as one of several means of understanding the current sentiment around a specific topic – if I can find it. But some of the comments on Amplicate are admittedly, too random. For example, ‘David’ is registering as a major hate for 11% of Amplicate’s users, but I am left confused as to whether they mean the celebrity DJ, David Guetta, or anyone famous named ‘David’ (comments point to both).

Ah, well: just another day in social media-land.