On the day when NBCNews’ Matt Lauer announced the debut of his Facebook page, 10 years into the existence of the site, it’s interesting that his own NBC News site had an article on software that determine your personality by your posts.
Since Facebook has become virtually ubiquitous among us, I guess it was only a matter of time that this would occur. Of course, someone like Matt Lauer, who only joined Facebook in the last day or so, must not have any personalty, LOL! I ran the program against my own posts, and I feel that the personality traits it assigned to me are fairly accurate. I can’t say that I post a lot to FB. I click on a lot of “Likes” to other people’s posts, and maybe I make three to four posts per week, whereas many people I know make three to four posts per hour. So it was interesting to me that the software could take the relatively few (in relation to others) posts I do make and come up with a fairly accurate personality assessment.
Of course, since I teach Information Security, I was somewhat hesitant to try such a thing – what if their software was gathering confidential information about me? But I figured that since it was on NBC’s site, it must have been vetted by them first, so it had to be OK. And since I’m creating a module on social media for inclusion in CSCI 1150 this summer, it would be just one more thing to comment on in that curriculum.
So after all of that, even though I do think the analysis was fairly accurate, it really was just an amusing little exercise. But it sure shows how integrated FB and other social media (Twitter, etc.) have become in our lives.
franktheitprof 