There’s no question that one of the most contested rivalries in sports worldwide is between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. So as we head in to the 2009 Major League Baseball postseason, we thought it’d be a good idea to let you preview a bit of the benefits review’d brings to the table through a real world example.

Now as you’ve probably read on the site, review’d is a Twitter sentiment analytics service. All that fancy speak basically means that we’re able to filter for and quantify when people express an opinion about something in 140 characters or less. To do so, we’ve developed a proprietary algorithm that scours Twitter and reports these data back to you in near real-time. Since we’re not “live” yet per se, I’ll give you a sense of some of the data we’ve been able to track on these two teams over the past couple of weeks.

Recognizing that the Sox and Yankees aren’t yet playing each other, it’s possible that’ll be a case soon. So why not keep an eye on how people feel about the teams over time? Chances are there are going to be plenty of die-hards..on both ends of the spectrum.

We started tracking these teams on Sept. 21, just before the season started winding down and we’ve been able to track more than 2,000 tweets that carry an opinion with them (and a keyword associated with the team). But taking a look closer is when it starts to get interesting.

For the Yankees during the period we tracked 1,086 positive tweets versus 196 negative. For the Sox, it was 710 positive versus 155 negative.

Here are a few examples of the tweets we tracked (on each side of the fence – no bias from us *wink* *cough* *#redsoxftw* *ahem*):

Red Sox (positive)

Red Sox (negative)

Yankees (positive)

Yankees (negative)

Just from that little bit a data you’re able to tell a lot already: how the teams are doing versus each other on a quantity (chattiness) and relative opinion basis. Yankees went about 85% positive and Red Sox at 82%. A tight race (no surprise given how close the games typically end). I think we have a new rivalry on our hands!

Imagine if you could analyze this after wins versus losses. Think about the value in following all the people who praise your team. What if you could trend these data over time and compare against Twitter campaign efforts? We could compare the four pairings of teams in the playoffs and see how they do as the series builds. There could be a growth (or shrinkage) of support as things progress – how so, and by whom? All of that – and more – will be possible with review’d!

Make sure you’ve signed-up for the Feedburner and are following @reviewd on Twitter to keep in touch with review’d. There’s plenty more to come…

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Image credit: team logos MLB, individual tweets copyright creators (linked to in image).