

Show HN:  How much can you tell about someone from their tweets?  - jmacd
http://fingerprint.leadsift.com/

======
danudey
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.

~~~
Anechoic
_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.

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

~~~
dustyreagan
All Twitter API methods require authentication now-a-days.
[https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-
api](https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api)

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

~~~
subv3rsion
Feels like click bait to me. They could use their own authentication token to
use the Twitter API. Not mine.

~~~
eli
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.

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itafroma
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](http://fingerprint.leadsift.com/?username=itafroma)

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

------
andrewcooke
huh. so [https://twitter.com/ColorlessG](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)

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

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

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

------
mgraczyk
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?

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AznHisoka
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.

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

------
650REDHAIR
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?

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

------
rpledge
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

------
lunixbochs
Horse ebooks:

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

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

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

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

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antjanus
Things it got wrong: sports interest and employment

Otherwise, good job! :)

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

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

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

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thoughtpalette
Got three things wrong on mine =\

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

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erbo
I've no quibble with what it found out about
[https://twitter.com/erbo](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?

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

~~~
erbo
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.

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nada_i
this is really cool

------
jdalgetty
got my gender wrong

