Summary
Some people think Twitter’s only uses are telling people what you had for lunch and stalking celebrities. But even though the content of most Tweets may seem frivolous, with a large enough sample size they do paint a portrait of the author. And we were curious to see if we could make something interesting out of all that information.
We knew we were on to something when the site got a shout out from the official @twitter account. The site was also featured on a number of technology blogs and generated some hilarious chatter on Twitter.
Some people think Twitter’s only uses are telling people what you had for lunch and stalking celebrities. But even though the content of most Tweets may seem frivolous, with a large enough sample size they do paint a portrait of the author. And we were curious to see if we could make something interesting out of all that information.
We decided to take publicly available Twitter data and use it to make something out of what we could find out about users' personalities. It being the holidays at the time, we took on the challenge of providing Twitter users with personalized gift recommendations.
So using the Twitter API, we built an algorithm to categorize users into personality archetypes. These archetypes were used to perform highly-targeted keyword searches using Amazon's API. The results from Amazon were then ranked and presented as gift suggestions. Because of the deep data pulls available via the APIs, you only need to provide a Twitter username to use this ingenious app.
We knew we were on to something when the site got a shout out from the official @twitter account. The site was also featured on a number of technology blogs and generated some hilarious chatter on Twitter.
My Role
I was responsible for the conceptual development of the project, helped create the algorithm and designed the interface.
