Written by Thilde Vesterby
Communication is a window into a person’s mind. And that is exactly why Dan Zarrella has built TweetPsych; an engine that can analyze the content on Twitter profiles and turn it into psychological profiles. The engine compares the content of a user’s Tweets to a baseline reading that is built by analyzing a large group of random Tweets and then highlighting areas where the user stands out.
It sounds a little scary, doesn’t it? Well, I had to try to analyze my own communication using TweetPsych. Although Zarella points out, that the engine works better on profiles with more than 1000 tweets, I had to give my pathetic number of 49 a go – and here’s what my psychological profile looks like according to TweetPsych:
According to this I score higher on sexual references than on positive feelings and music – but I’m pretty sure I never wrote a single tweet about sex…. I could be wrong, though ☺ TweetPsych does let me know that I tend to talk in the present tense, I am concrete and constructive and that I talk a lot about my job, which I guess, is true.
I don’t know if the feature is quite ready for being used for psychological profiling, but it’s pretty entertaining and it might have the potential of becoming a very (maybe too) powerful marketing tool. I think we have to keep in mind that Twitter is a social media tool that allows users to communicate their thoughts in 140 characters at a time – it cannot be seen as someone’s personality in total.
Read more about TweetPsych and the creator Dan Zarella on his blog: danzarrella.com.
Similar Posts:
- This Is Your Social Media Behaviour
- The Bees Awards – First International Social Media Award Show
- The Social Web
