There is little doubt that the web is being fundamentally transformed by social media. The realization that we now live a significant part of our lives online is giving rise to new perspectives on text analytics and to new interaction paradigms. Emotions and experiences are key to communication in social media: recognizing and tracking them in highly dynamic multilingual text streams produced by users around Europe, or even around the globe, is an emerging area for research and innovation. I will illustrate this with a few examples derived from online reputation management and large scale mood tracking.