Webware

We've covered several utilities that have found fun and creative ways to analyze Twitter messages, but TweetPsych takes the cake. This one looks at your past 1,000 Twitter posts and gives you a "psychological" profile, including how much you talk about yourself, work, money, and "negative emotions."

In other words, it's a great way to reinforce the fact that you're probably using Twitter for self-promotion, and/or as a way to kvetch. At least that was its analysis of my tweets.

In an introductory blog post about the tool, creator Dan Zarrella says the it works by cross-referencing the words and phrases you use in your tweets to two different dictionaries that are sorted into various psychological profiles. It then scores you in each category based on the results of other TweetPsych users. This makes it less about psychology and more about your personal lexicon, but the results are still quite fun.

The service works with any Twitter account, meaning you can use it on anyone else you know. As mentioned earlier, it only pulls from the last 1,000 or so tweets you've made, so the results will not be nearly as detailed if you're a new Twitter user.

TweetPsych analyzes your old Twitter messages to figure out what's going on inside that head of yours.

(Credit: CNET)

You sleep with your boss' lover. You steal a stranger's dog. Or you win the lottery. Who is the first person you tell? And who is the second?

I ask only because I came across this utterly depressing conclusion about humanity from John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago: Americans have fewer people to confide in now than they did 20 years previously.

Apparently, it's down to two from three.

In 2004, 25 percent of people claimed that they had not been able to confide in anyone for six months. Twenty years previously, that figure had only been 7 percent.

For some people, this might explain at least one of the attractions of Twitter--or any other social-networking contraption. You feel you have to tell someone. So you tell, well, everyone. Or at least everyone that you can friend, name, follow, stalk, or badger into accepting your offer of association.

Jacqueline Olds, a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School, suggests that loneliness somehow doesn't sit comfortably with American ideals such as independence and striving and extremely large burgers. (I may have come up with that last one.)

Yet if you can get a bunch of neuroscientists into one McDonald's, most will agree that vital parts of our brains became so developed precisely because they had to deal with all of the social stimuli and coding that swirl around us.

This photograph is entitled: "its such a lonely day and i can see the sky coming to kill me." Wonder if he's twittered that.

(Credit: CC Not So Good Photography)

So might Twitter be a pathetic cry of comfort for those who truly feel the need for something even vaguely approaching human intimacy and understanding? An intimacy and understanding most people believe that they can't demand any more because everyone else is busy, successful, stressed, or simply fabulously self-centered?

There is something inherently poignant about people feeling good about bothering others with their tweets, while being entirely reluctant to bother them with real and justified needs.

Professor Cacioppo seems to see hope in, of all things, the economic recession. You might almost believe that he was praying for a great and lasting depression when the San Francisco Chronicle quoted him as saying, "People can't go out, and they have to be home together. It's nice to be able to depend on one another."

Twitter as a form of virtual human interdependence? Now there's a concept to which some enterprising college can dedicate research funds.

A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.

As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader and Ph.D. student Laura Buffardi said in a Live Science article about the study. Past research back in the dinosaur days of the Web had revealed similar conclusions about narcissists and personal Web pages. Imagine how hard it was to self-promote when you had to know how to use HTML to turn the background of your personal homepage pink!

In order to conduct the study, untrained observers were shown Facebook profiles and asked to identify which ones belonged to people who are classified as narcissists. The narcissists' profiles were easy to pick out, the researchers noted.

The report is published in October's issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin academic journal.

"Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage," study co-author W. Keith Campbell said to Live Science. "They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run."

So it looks like now the prolific Internet chatter about oversharers, bloggy self-promoters, and "wantrepreneurs" now has some academic basis.