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Are You What You Tweet? TweetPsych's Micro-Analysis

by Warren Riddle on June 16, 2009 at 02:15 PM

Engaging in discussion with anthropologists or linguists can be highly awkward. Those clinical types tend to scrutinize and evaluate every word, gesture, and facial expression, which can make conversation seem impersonal and uncomfortable. What else would you expect? These social scientists are attempting to decipher your unspoken messages and subconscious motivations.

Well, now you can subject yourself to that type of linguistic analysis privately, painlessly, and for free -- on Twitter. Social and viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella has combined two linguistic models (which determine how you think based on speech and writing patterns) and a special algorithm to create a psychological profile based on your tweets. The program, TweetPsych, evaluates the user's last 1,000 tweets, so it obviously works best for heavy users of the site. Zarrella also says on his Web site that the analysis is more accurate for single users (not a group account) who use Twitter as a medium for conversation rather than for posting links or notices (in other words, how a real person would communicate).

If you're interested in the hidden workings of your brain, go ahead and check it out. But what you learn may not be too surprising. According to Zarrella's creation, we like to talk about ourselves "a lot." But we didn't need a fancy algorithm or big scientific words to tell us that. [From: DanZarrella.com and TweetPsych]

Tags: linguistics, psychology, tweet, tweetpsych, twitter

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