What Would I Say: Facebook App Predicts What Users Would Write With Scary Accuracy

What would I say on Facebook? The latest app sweeping the social networking site has the answer.

The What Would I Say app was developed by a team at Princeton University, creating surreal combinations of text intended to sound like something the person might actually write.The app scours the user’s past history of posting and generates a post from the most commonly used words and subjects.

The students debuted the app at last week’s Princeton Hackathon.

“We drank a lot of coffee and Red Bull and thought of fun things we could program that we could actually complete in a day and a half,” said Ugne Klibaite, a student in the university’s Quantitative and Computational Biology program who helped develop the app.

Kilbaite said What Would I Say was never intended to get as big as it has.

“This was just for fun,” Klibaite told The New Yorker. “We never thought we would get further than showing this off at the Hackathon and to our friends on Facebook.”

It didn’t stay that way for long. Within two days, the app was spreading all over Facebook and was even linked by Gawker.

The What Would I Say app isn’t the newest idea. As Geekosystem notes, it’s pretty similar to one called That Can Be My Next Tweet, which generates tweets based on commonly used words. But What Would I Say runs much more smoothly, the report notes.

Facebook users can expect to see What Would I Say showing up quite a bit on their news feed, but they don’t have to worry about the rumors that have plagued other apps as well as memes like the Giraffe Riddle. The makers of What Would I Say have already come out to say that the app doesn’t store personal information, saying they don’t even have computers capable of storing the information.

For anyone interested, the What Would I Say app can be found here.