The sentiment engine, Twindex, shows that for much of this year, Romney has trailed Obama. As a spokesperson from Topsy explained to me this morning, 50 is the middle ground in the chart below: anything above is positive sentiment, and anything below is negative sentiment.

Clearly, the campaign has been a fairly negative, nasty one. But Obama consistently had higher sentiment ratings on Twitter over the past year:

Fast forward to today, however — Topsy does real-time analysis, after all — and the story changes just a little bit. While over the last 24 hours, Obama has still led Romney in terms of positive comments and supportive tweets, in just the last hour, Obama has dropped and Romney jumped.

Now both now sit in the low sixties: Obama at 61, and Romney at 62:

However, Obama still holds an overall lead in sentiment, probably aided by the fact that the sitting president has five times as many Twitter followers as Romney: 10 million to 1.7 million (something we’ve reported on before). A lead built up over the course of an entire year, of course, is difficult to overcome in a single day.

Election watchers can follow Twitter sentiment in real-time at election.twitter.com – simply refresh for regular updates.

photo credit: snaps via photopin cc

The Bday Gift Finder is a simple concept. After the app connects to your Facebook profile, it scans and analyzes your friend’s “likes” from top brand pages. You can click on a friend’s profile to see from which retailer, physical or online, they might like a gift. You can use the app to buy the gift, which actually comes in the form of a gift card. (The company doesn’t deliver it for you, you’ll have to go through the retailers website.)

Bday plans on making money through partnerships with retailers — ideally it will process the gift-card payment directly in Facebook and taking a percentage of the transaction. However, as of right now, the company is simply driving shoppers to the retailers, which may be the first step in proving its relevancy and landing those partnerships.

Numerous Facebook gifting apps have popped up recently, including Giftiki, which focuses on group gift giving based on friends’ gift requests. There are also some outside of Facebook, including GroupGifting which recently launched CoachGifter.com, a way for groups to easily buy gifts for their coaches.

The main differentiator for Bday Gift Finder appears to be its emphasis on sentiment. The company claims that it can tell if a “like” is either positive or negative. For example, if a friend is protesting a brands environmental regulations, then you wouldn’t want to send them a gift card for that brand, because they were “liking” a negative aspect of it. The company says it uses man-power to scan for these types of brand pages and does not include them.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company, founded in 2011, secured the first round of funding from Tel-Ad Electronics Ltd., a technology company in Israel. The financing will be used to further expand Bday’s technology and product portfolio.

The company targets Fortune 500 companies, like Comcast and the Royal Bank of Canada. It offers the ability to reach a large set of customers via telephone and analyze voice responses through crowdsourcing techniques. The results are meant to help companies figure out audience emotions, like sentiment and intent, towards things like products, services, or customer service. Thus, helping to market easier to these consumers without the expenses of a call center.

As noted by TechCrunch, investors include 500 Startups, Innovation Endeavors, Juvo Capital, Kapor Capital, Kima Ventures, Orefa Investment, PG Ventures, Ty Danco and Matthew Grodin.

The Mountain View, California-based company, founded in 2009, is lead by co-founder Guy Hirsch, a serial entrepreneur who has founded three companies to date, as well as co-founder and chief technologist Mariya Genzel, an MIT graduate.