What Our Digital Footprint Says About Us

The way we each approach and interact with social media does say a lot about us. However, as in my case, and im sure others here would agree, I generally prefer to not interact with social media by actively liking or sharing things. I merely observe, I use the social media tools that allow me to connect and reconnect with others, but I believe that the onlooker or the analyst that tries to derive information from my likes and dislikes, will ultimately come out empty handed. So this indeed says a bit about me, but I may be entirely different from another fellow "observer" of social media who also doesn't actively like or share.

It's trivially easy. I built a simple proof of concept a last month with ~30 lines of code:

http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil

> Sorry, we are unable to generate a prediction. An insufficient number of your Likes match with those in our database, and we don’t believe in guesswork.

Huh. I click like a lot on Facebook, I wonder what throws their algorithm off.

> First of all, just being on social media, I believe, makes people happier.

Um, no. http://uk.businessinsider.com/social-media-use-can-contribut...

> The same instincts drive us to read celebrity magazines and watch soap operas.

Wait, what?

The whole linked site -- http://applymagicsauce.com/ just seems deeply unethical for a University, regardless og where it sits on the spectrum of [abuse of human research subjects] to [selling snake oil]

Took the test on the website. The results are so off. It couldn't even predict my gender, not to mention other traits. If that website actually reflects their method, it is ridiculously overclaimed.

> Facebook serves one of our most basic instincts: to socialize, gossip, and feel needed

I've never had a social media account. Feels strange that I seem to be missing a "basic instinct". Not sure what to make of this.

Heh heh. So wrong. I'm no androgynous 27-year-old.