Who do you think you think you are?

Lately, I’ve been playing with the new release of Twitalyzer (serious analytics for Twittererers), which features an intriguing “Personality” report.  Twitalyzer uses TweetPsych to assess tweets and create a profile based on social and psychological cues.  Fascinating stuff – of course, the question is not

“What does my online behaviour say about me?”
it’s
“What does what I say allow people to perceive about me?”.

Now, I’m one of very few Emer Kirranes out there as far as the internet is concerned.  With this in mind, I feel obliged to be very careful about what I share and say online.  I’m also vaguely contrary about giving away my information generally – for example, Facebook thinks I’m ten years younger than I am (though, to be fair, so do I), and I suspect that Google thinks I’m male.  Having said that, I have noticed that quite a bit of “me” is discernable from a rummage around search engines, a rake through my Tweets and a quick rifle through my blog posts and comments.  But perhaps it depends on how hard you look.

I put together the word cloud below out of search engine results from Yahoo!, Google and Bing on “Emer Kirrane” in order to profile the person that emerged (click on the image to see full size).

Apart from the fact that it appears I didn’t exist before my present employment, the persona that materializes is largely professional and betrays little in terms of personal likes, dislikes, hobbies etc (unless of course you take “masquerading” out of context).  Yet the fact remains that I can see “me” buried in there.  And when I look at my Personality report on Twitalyzer or my profile on PsychTweet, there’s still quite a bit of “me” to be found.  It’s controlled, and it’s limited, but I’m in there.

So, if you could combine a psychological profile built out of an overall online personality with your web analytics data, rather than just guessing from browsing behaviour and referrer information, imagine the targeting possibilities!  Given that with something like Yahoo! Web Analytics (at the risk of a shameless plug), you can tell the age, gender and inferred interests of visitors (aggregated) if they’re logged into part of the Yahoo! network, it can’t be a dream that’s impossible to dream – can it?