A few days ago, one of my Tweeps (that’s Twitter talk for “friends” – I’m so cool) told me about a new Twitter-related service called TweetPsych.

TweetPsych’s developer, Dan Zarrella, markets the service as a tool for “psychological profiling” (but provides the usual “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer) and upon first glance, it’s kind of cool. You just type your Twitter name, click “Profile,” and wait for TweetPsych to analyze your last 1,000 tweets and tell you things such as how often you talk about yourself, whether positive or negative emotions tend to dominate your tweets, and even how agreeable a person you are.

I thought about TweetPsyching a handful of popular celebrities who use Twitter (you know, those who really use and “get” Twitter, like @collective_soul, @MCHammer, and yes, even @iamdiddy with his incessent “LET’S GO!”s and “GET LOCKED IN!”s and not celebs like @britneyspears whose tweets smack of “My assistant told me to write this or flat out wrote it him/herself”), but I passed it along to my fellow Psych Central writers first.

Good thing, too.

As it turns out, TweetPsych goes a little bit beyond “for entertainment purposes only”; according to Psych Central’s Dr. John Grohol (whose main points are below in bold), TweetPsych:

• Was created by someone who seems to have little or no background in psychology, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing if the person did his research with proper research tools, but Zarrella…
• …uses two dictionaries that aren’t suited for this kind of service. The first, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), is based primarily on people’s writings and spoken words and is not designed for 140-character tweets where abbreviations and retweets, which represent someone else’s thoughts or announcements, run rampant. The second, the English Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID), was developed by one lone professional and has no research backing.
• Offers no results explanation whatsoever. My own TweetPsych told me that I talk a lot about myself, express more positive than negative emotions, and show very little anxiety – which are easy enough to understand – but also told me that my “Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content” ranks higher in abstract thought, social behavior, and temporal references than glory, audio sensations, and moral imperative – and offered nothing to explain any of that.

Aside from TweetPsych results being thus far scientifically unreliable, people who use the tool must remember that the only things getting psyched are their tweets. Sure, you might be pretty honest on Twitter, but chances are high that your tweets don’t accurately reflect everything you say, think, and feel each day.

Example?

In real life, I very rarely talk about myself. I do tend to have more positive than negative emotions, but I actually experience anxiety a lot. TweetPsych gave me a score of 26.26 in “Music” but if the score reflected how often I listen to, talk about, and read up on music-related things behind the screen, it’d probably be more along the lines of 76.89.

Dr. Grohol wraps up his TweetPsych review with:

TweetPsych, despite its limitations, has opened the door to future services that actually provide usable, useful and actionable information that would likely have greater validity. Imagine taking not only a person’s tweets, but information contained within their Facebook profile, blog, etc., and have it placed all into one huge analysis engine… Such an engine might have then have the capability of providing true psychological insight into an individual based upon what they say online.

Until that time, we have freshmen efforts like TweetPsych, which really should be called “TweetFun!” Because while it is indeed fun to play with, it provides little psychological insight — except of the most shallow kind — into anyone.

Want to read the public discussion between Dr. Grohol and Dan Zarrella thus far? Have at it. In the meantime, keep in mind that while TweetPsych can be good for a few minutes of fun, it doesn’t accurately reflect the kind of analysis you’d get from a professional, just as your Twitter stream likely doesn’t accurately reflect every aspect of your real life.

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    Last reviewed: 19 Jun 2009