TweetPsych: This is your brain on Twitter

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)

[hmdz105]

The website failed to respond!

[Berke.h]

Haha I never imagined twitter could be used for so many versatile ways. :)

Good one.

[MatchesMalone]

I don't believe that any type of analysis of my last thousand tweets, or any of my over 20K tweets, will lead to any meaningful data that can be used by anyone other than myself, as no one else knows why I'm using Twitter, except for me. Search for The Experiment, and see what you come up with.

[setjeff15081947]

"This is your brain on Twitter" ... makes a glaring assumption. That "Tweeters" have a brain? Now, where is that ol' "Wizard of Oz" when you really need him?

[stepyourgameup]

Shouldn't it always just say, "Your a loser for using Twitter"?

[tipoo_]

I just dont understand twitter! Its like Facebook, minus everything but the status update...Whats the point?

[DocJohnG]

Unfortunately, this effort lacks the actual science and psychology necessary to make it even a semi-useful tool. And as I note in my review and analysis of the tool, it is undergoing constant revision right now, meaning the results aren't particularly useful, reliable or valid:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/06/18/putting-cool-ahead-of-science-tweetpsych/