Find Your Twitter Psychological Matches

Jun 23rd 2009 View Comments




I think the most powerful potential feature of a system like TweetPsych is its ability to match people based on their cognitive processes, so I’ve added two features to the still beta TweetPsych.

People That Think Like You

When you generate a profile for yourself or someone else, TweetPsych will also show you a list of 5 users who it believes share similar psychological characteristics. This matching is not done topically, therefore the other users you’re presented with may not Tweet about the same things as you.

These users come only from the list of users that the system has analyzed so far, so the results will get better as it analyzes more accounts. Starting this week, I am automatically profiling accounts starting with a few prioritized lists, including most ReTweeted users and most followed users to help build a large dataset for comparison.

Site Profiling

The second feature I added this weekend is site profiling. When you enter a URL TweetPsych will create a psychological profile of the content on that page and match it against its database of user profiles, returning the 50 closest matches.

Again, this matching is not done on a topical basis, meaning the users presented might not tweet about the same subjects the page is about. The goal is to help you find users that may be mentally aligned with the psycho-graphic profile of the web page you provided.

And just to reiterate, TweetPsych is still beta stuff and I’m aware there are issues, specifically around explaining and presenting the features in a more understandable way, but my first priorities were making the system stable under the huge traffic load (and my host MediaTemple has been awesome helping me) and fleshing out the potential power of the technology. I’m very open to new feature suggestions as I continue working on TweetPsych.

I am contemplating the possibility of releasing an API but I’m still thinking about how to handle the possibly high server resource demands. What features would you like to see in an API?

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  • http://working-on.me Annaly

    As someone interested in psychology I find this fascinating. Amazing the spin-offs that have come about all because of Twitter.

  • http://www.dailyseoblog.com Mani Karthik

    Awesome concept Dan.
    Impressed with the way it works, I hope the “profiling more profiles” gets done soon so its “open” to all.
    Cheers !
    Mani Kaarthik
    DailySEOblog.com

  • http://www.christophercatania.com Chris Catania

    Interesting tool. I just tried it out and was surprised at the results, but then again, I wasn’t that surprised because I tend to use Twitter in a very specialized way most of the time. I think it will also turn out more complete results had I had more than 1000 updates.

    And once this tool gets developed a bit more, I imagine it would be a very helpful analytic tool for brands but also for bloggers looking to find their audience on Twitter. I would love to use it for my Live Fix blog because it would help me analyze and better understand the tweeting that goes on during live music concerts. Any suggestions on how I could use it to do experiments now?

    Thanks, Dan!

  • http://nathanholland.com Nate Holland

    This is amazing. I have not tried it yet, but I sure will. Interesting concept. It’s always nice to get to converse with people who think like you(to some extent). Glad I stumbled upon your site.

  • mikejoe

    a facebookpsych beta would not only give off a larger range of data but I think it would be far more interesting

  • Margriet Groenevelt

    Dear Dan, is TweetPsych language independent? I'm tweeting in French, Dutch and English. Please your answer on Twitter.com/mgroenevelt
    Kind regards, Margriet

  • Margriet Groenevelt

    Dear Dan, is TweetPsych language independent? I'm tweeting in French, Dutch and English. Please your answer on Twitter.com/mgroenevelt
    Kind regards, Margriet