The Tyler Hayes

(UPDATE 6/18/2009: Dr. John Grohol wrote up his own (totally sweet) assessment of TweetPsych. If you’re looking for real medical commentary & opinion, check it out: “Putting Cool Ahead of Science: TweetPsych.” I highly recommend it.)

Ahh… the day has arrived. Psychology has finally wiggled its way into social media. You see, for the last couple years we’ve seen a boom in three areas:

1. Social media resources (i.e. networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and microblogging services like Twitter)
2. Social media advice that tell us what to do with/how to benefit from those content sites (i.e. experts like Chris Brogan, and news blogs like Mashable)
3. Social media tools that allow us to go above & beyond the scope of the resources themselves (i.e. TweetDeck, Apture, BuzzStream).

However, there is a 4th category that is still being defined: Social media ethics & etiquette. Personally, this is what interests me most in social media.

Enter TweetPsych, a website created by social media great Dan Zarrella. TweetPsych is a site that purports to fit into category 3, as a psychological profiling & assessment tool. From Dan’s introductory blog post on the site,

“TweetPsych uses the LIWC and RID (linguistic analysis methods to profile a person based on what they write) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their Tweets.”

…

“I think the possibilities of a system like this are enormous, from matching like-minded users to identifying users that exhibit certain useful or desirable traits”

To be clear, I think what Dan is doing is absolutely wonderful. In fact, I hope he gets some funding behind this and some professional coders to hone his algorithms. Services like TweetPsych can benefit all of us. Of course, I’m certainly not as well-versed in RID & LIWC as Dan, or more advanced psychological matters, either.However, I do still have my concerns:

• Most civilians don’t have a grasp on psychology, its meaning, and its inherent power. Pop psychology is a dangerous tool to wield. Dan is using his professional knowledge of psychology to create a pop psychology tool.
• Twitter may not be the best representation of who someone is. It’s very easy to be fake, dis-genuine, and inauthentic.
• Social media sites like Twitter don’t seem to offer a good level of consistency until someone reaches at least a couple thousand tweets. I can honestly say that my first 1-2,000 tweets were all over the place.
• How do blogging & microblogging writing methods differ from standard writing methods? Journalists & professional writers often bash bloggers for a multitude of reasons.
• Finding other like-minded users will indeed be useful, but it would be nice if Dan wrote some reports on how TweetPsych’s profiling helped users match with others more successfully than just by using self-reporting (e.g. the Twitter bio).
• What are “useful or desirable traits”? Maybe eventually TweetPsych will be considered a reliable and valid source of information in this area, in a couple years. Until then, I would stick with proven psychological tests like the MBTI (Meiers-Briggs Type Inventory, I’m an ENFP by the way).
• These aren’t all my thoughts, but I’m way too tired to write any more for now. Add yours below!

I hope Dan doesn’t shut down what he’s doing, and I doubt he would even if he was pressured. These thoughts are just an outline of my initial reaction to his site, given the very little psychology background I have from my own Psychology major in undergrad. The site is still very young, and I’m sure it will be improved immensely over the coming months and years. Let’s all hope we see more sites like this popping up reeeeeeally soon!