Turning Twitter into a psychological Match.com

A week or so ago I wrote about a new service built on top of Twitter called TweetPsych, which aimed to provide you with some psychological markers based on your Twitter account. It did this using some fancy linguistic algorithms and some homebrewed frameworks of some sort.

Well between then and now the author of the service Dan Zerralla has been hard at work adding some new ways to use the TweetPsych service. Now in addition to the original psychological evaluation of your place in the Twittersphere you can also do the following

Find your perfect psychological match on Twitter – as well as the typical profile information TweetPsych now will show you 5 Twitter users that is believed to match, or share, your psychological characteristics. This selection isn’t done topically so your results should differ from other suggested Twitter follower sites.

Create a psychological profile of your Twitter content – when you use this option TweetPsych will take the created psychological profile and compare it against the database of user profiles and return a list of 50 of the closest matches. As Dan says in the post about this option: “The goal is to help you find users that may be mentally aligned with the psycho-graphic profile of the web page you provided.”

I don’t know about you but this whole idea of being psychologically profiled by anything let alone Twitter is really bothersome, and worrisome. I realize that it is being done by more people than just Dan Zarrella but that doesn’t mean I – or you – have to like it.