Social and viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella has released a web tool to analyse people’s psychological profiles on Twitter.

Zarrella claims that TweetPsyc uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets.

“The service analyses your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform,” the site says.

According to Read Write Web, where I first heard about this, RID is a text analysis tool composed of more than 3000 words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis software program that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words in emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech.

“The program considers positive and negative emotion words, self-references, and words that refer to sex, eating, or religion,” the site reports.

I’ve only made 523 Tweets, which is below the recommended number for analysis.

That may be why my descriptors sound fairly introspective, or it could be I just sound shy compared with the online exhibitionists who tell all.

My “primordial, conceptual and emotional content” sounds somewhat contradictory, although it’s nice of the computer to say my writing shows “constructive behaviors”.

I’m interested to read more about the veracity of tools like this. Part of me suspects I’m just boosting the influence of the “viral marketing scientist” who developed it.