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Judging a stranger by their tweets
January 22nd, 2009 by Lukas BiewaldIn previous posts, we looked at what happens when people judged strangers by their pictures. This time we looked at how people would judge strangers by their twitter feeds.
We took the top 200 twitterers from http://twitterholic.com/ and asked people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to judge how smart, interesting, trustworthy, etc. they thought they were.
Here’s a scatterplot of the top twitterers showing the smart vs. interesting values. You can see someone like Matt Cutts was thought to be smart but not entertaining, while Jimmy Fallow was judged as entertaining but not as smart.
If you mouse over a feed you can see what turkers said in the free response field.
PS Without asking permission, I subjected some of the D.L. people to the same treatment… Chris was tagged as “rocker” and “sarcastic” (dead on). Travis was tagged as “chatty” and “sarcastic” (starting to see a pattern :) ). Steph was tagged as “productive” and “good”. Brendan was tagged as “confusing” and “busy”. The author got “dramatic” and “rambling”, which was nicer than I expected.
If you’re feeling brave and you want to be included in the next batch send a message to @doloreslabs on twitter…
And since I can’t bear to pass up an opportunity to make a classic powerlaw graph in R, here is a graph of tags and their frequencies. The x-axis is subsampled substantially.:
(Shout out to Travis for the idea of this post.)
Update
- In a late-night fit of inspiration, Chris made the above chart zoom-able (with the scroll-wheel) and search-able.
- For those of you that want a simpler interface to looks at the results here it is.
- To answer some of the questions in the comments: the turkers could see the username of the person twittering, so certainly that affected the results.
- If you want to be included in further experiments, please follow doloreslabs on Twitter.
- If there is interest, we could post the raw data for people to build their own visualizations, shoot us an email if you want access.
-Lukas
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Are you using the entire twitterstream, i.e. regular tweets + @ tweets, or just the regular tweets? @ tweets tend to be more conversational. Also, do you want a direct message on Twitter or an @ reply? In any case, include @philosophygeek on your next round =)
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:52 pm
DL does it again! Very cool.
Could you please show us plots of how smart, interesting, trustworthy, etc. they are versus their popularity?
Thanks much!
–JW
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 am
Great analysis. Simple, understandable but none the less compelling. The request from Justin Wehr would be a nice addition and bring even deeper insight in the correlations.
Thanks,
–Benjamin
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:07 am
I chuckled to see one person I dropped as dumber and less entertaining. I couldn’t agree more, so I’ll assume the rest of these results as fairly accurate as well.
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:49 am
Whoa. This is rad. I also would like to know if this included @replies. The replies can mean any number of things that they may or may not be, taken outside of the context of the original message. If they included the replies, was the turker given access to the other feed as well?
y’all are gettin’ a new follower. well done.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:42 am
Top 200 Twitterers on a scatterplot…
The Dolores Labs Team looked at how people would judge strangers by their twitter feeds. The Dolores Labs Blog describes how they approach and realized the task
……
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:56 am
Is there a non graphic readout? Can’t find my name by rollover, number 93 on the list.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Dave it isn’t an image, view the source of http://assets.doloreslabs.com/blog/toptwitter.html - it says you’re “serious, Average, entertaining, well-informed, well-informed”
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Did the turkers see the twitterers’ usernames? If so, algore and stephencolbert and other celebrities were being judged not just on their tweets but on their general reputation.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Wow.
This is a neat post.
Thanks for letting me know about it.
January 23rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Algore is smarter? I agree he’s more entertaining. Definitely not smarter.
January 24th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I’m bummed that we didn’t hit the bottom-left corner. Seriously, someone thinks the Woot Twitter feed is ’smart’ or ‘entertaining’? Probably the same person who commented “Boot”.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
as with most surveys the value will come from the way the group filling the survey out was chosen. If I can give an example: a younger person might find an older person smarter because they do not understand the subject the person tweets about as well. They may also find another person of similar age group more entertaining than someone in another demographic because of shared interests and life experience.
These are minor things though, as what we are talking about here. i guess, is perceptions. i find it quite interesting to see how twitter is attracting so much of this type of study and how these types of studies are influencing the behaviour of the people using twitter who relate back to them.
I find the whole culture quite fascinating.
thanks for the post!
January 27th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
While Borat may be one of the dumbest twitterers of the lot, he is way more entertaining than most of those posted here IMHO (yet placed in the bottom left); e.g. starbucks? wordpress? come one, when is the last time those guys made you laugh?
Seriously, great post!
February 4th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Great stuff guys. Did you do the scatter plot straight up in javascript & html or use some templating / plotting toolkit?
May 12th, 2009 at 2:10 am
Hey Peter, we got really ambitious on an idle monday night and made the sweetest interactive scatter plot imaginable with a little help from the http://mootools.net framework.
June 10th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Google Webmaster Youtube channel mentioned about this page :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QIxTI59r5o
December 30th, 2009 at 7:13 am
LOL! Matt Cutts being rated as clever but less entertaining is so spot on! It is actually scary how your twittering can expose you for being a twit if you’re not careful! Always remember that every word uttered in cyberspace is recorded somewhere, and might just very well come back to haunt you in future! So keep it clean, clever and fun, and you should be OK!