Show HN: How much can you tell about someone from their tweets? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How much can you tell about someone from their tweets?

fingerprint.leadsift.com

33 pointsjmacd41 comments

Things it got right:

Some interests (technology, science, politics (yes), business (kind of)), my gender (male), my relationship status (married), and my pet status (enabled). Plus, a gimmie: my location (Vancouver).

Things it got wrong: my parent status (I don't have kids, though we're trying), my employment (it thinks I'm a professor, due to my bio), and one interest (ugh sports).

Not bad, all in all, but pretty simplistic. I was hoping for some deeper insights.

It got my parent status wrong, too - and I'm single! The rest of it was pretty on the mark, though.

Things it got wrong: my parent status

It got my parental status wrong as well (at least I'm not aware of any kids!). However several of my twitter friends are parents and we've discussed their kids on severe occasions, I wonder if the algorithm is misinterpreting those connections and conversations.

Why does this need access to my Twitter account to run? Can't it just get the publicly-facing information from the Twitter API?

All Twitter API methods require authentication now-a-days. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Why don't they authenticate with their own Twitter account? I'm not sure why they would need mine.

The Twitter API calls are rate limited and it would be impossible to handle any meaningful traffic.

Feels like click bait to me. They could use their own authentication token to use the Twitter API. Not mine.

Click bait in what sense? They are only requesting access to read (not post) tweets.

And the reason is because that's how Twitter sort of forces you to do it with their API rate limiting.

At the very least they should seriously limit to privileges they are requesting. Why do you need to be able to post as me, view my password(?!?!?) and update my profile?

You are listing the items in the "This application WILL NOT BE ABLE TO" section. Obviously, no application gets to view your Twitter password...

The actual app requests read access to your timeline and followers list.

Ah my bad. Thanks for correcting me :)

This might simply be an easy way for the company providing the app to get a lot of twitter users access tokens, to be used in their commercial product in order to get around the twitter API rate limits... LeadSift requires a read-only access so it should not affect you too much.

Maybe it's obvious to others, but just a heads up that it is caching/saving information it collects from your API access and then making its assessment public. I ran it on my own Twitter handle and can access the results page[1] even in private browsing mode and with its API access revoked. Fairly annoying considering its "insights" are mostly wrong.

[1]: http://fingerprint.leadsift.com/?username=itafroma

It knows that I'm male and employed. Not particularly impressive.

huh. so https://twitter.com/ColorlessG is male, and interested in politics, tech, science, art and sports.

maybe you need to detect when there's nothing significant and say so? :o)

Or at least not assume that every male is interested in sports.

This is an interesting idea and congrats on shipping. It got some things wrong about me though: http://fingerprint.leadsift.com/?username=__rlp

Not interested in sports and I'm not employed as a writer. With a little more accuracy it would be pretty cool.

Yes, and I'm not a pet owner. And my college friend is not employed.

From the comments this sounds like an interesting tool, but I don't have a twitter so I guess I can't try it out?

Sports? Literature? Such generic interests. Would be nice to know if someone was interested in say internet marketing, or big data. Something a bit more specific.

My guess is that those things take time to learn/hone? I was impressed what it could do as a first attempt...

It's pretty close. With over 8k tweets (and a load of pictures) I was expecting a little more.

TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS SPORTS SCIENCE POLITICS

Would be neat to click on those broad categories and get the tweets that fall into those categories.

Also, the social fingerprint page is super sluggish when scrolling- anyone else experiencing this?

Do you know of any other services which offer greater insight into topics that are of interest to you?

Got my gender wrong - which seems strange as my interests were all typically male (science/tech/sports)... Not being sexist here, it would be interesting if it would list tweets for each category with a weight but maybe that would give away their algorithm

Horse ebooks:

Female. Car owner. Pet owner. Married. Popular tweet: "Avoid situations" (5616 retweets)

Interested in: Business, Science, Technology, Sports, Travel

Wow that loading bar at the top of the page is horrendous.

This application does not guess much about me, but thinks I'm a teenager. That, I can't help to be proud of :)

Things it got wrong: sports interest and employment

Otherwise, good job! :)

Interesting concept, but it thought my male friend was female and married.

How much? apparently not too much from the account I've tested

It knew all the basics about me: Male, Married, Car Owner, Pet Owner, etc.

Got three things wrong on mine =\

I tested it with my girlfriends twitter count and it said she was Male. Maybe I am missing something @_@

I've no quibble with what it found out about https://twitter.com/erbo except that it labeled me as a "parent" when I'm not. What's it basing that assessment on? Or would that be telling?

Without going too much into the details: we analyze a user's public posts and the network structure to probabilistically infer the data.

I wonder what I tweeted or what it is about my network that would cause you to infer that I'm a parent when I'm not?

Of course, as you say, it's probabilistic, meaning it's not "wrong" that it incorrectly identifies me in particular as a parent; it's only "wrong" if a large number of those parent/non-parent inferences are incorrect over all analyzed accounts.

It said I was employed and owned a dog and car. I'm a freelancer, and don't own a dog or a car.

Further, I don't remember tweeting about any of those things in the past year, if at all.

I just ran it on myself and a friend of mine (who's far more prolific than I am on Twitter). It said we're both parents, but neither of us are. It didn't get that I'm married (I guess I haven't ever mentioned my wife).

this is really cool

got my gender wrong

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