That person is Dan Zarrella, a guest contributor to Mashable and a social and viral marketing scientist. Dan's taken two linguistic methods for unraveling the written word, combined it with the Porter stemming algorithm to reduce words to their base meaning, and created TweetPysch, a simple new service that derives a psychological profile based on a user's last 1,000 tweets.
Behind the scenes, however, TweetPsych is doing some sophisticated analysis on your cognitive content-rich status updates. The site is using the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methods to analyze every character and return primordial, conceptional, emotional, and cognitive content.
According to Dan's blog post introducing the new site, "TweetPsych uses the LIWC and RID to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their Tweets. It compares the content of a user’s Tweets to a baseline reading I’ve built by analyzing an ever-expanding group of over 1.5 million random Tweets, then highlighting areas where the user stands out."
It's an interesting idea to say the least. Applying psychological profiling to Twitter could open the door for a variety of use cases as the application matures. We do think TweetPsych could be a tad more user-friendly and information-rich if it included some deeper analysis and implications for interpreting the returned results, but we'll look for that as it evolves. As it stands, TweetPysch offers an interesting perspective on Twitter behavior that may have escaped your radar.
More Twitter Tools from Mashable
- 25 Twitter Apps to Manage Multiple Accounts