Dan Zarrella has long impressed us with his discourses on the science of retweets as well as his psychoanalytic apps that scan and parse Twitter streams, one for general analysis and one for dreams.
His latest project, TweetPsych for lists, is an enlightening and often amusing look at what your lists are talking about, how they view the world, what turns them on (or off) and more. Depending on how you group your Twitter friends, you can make interesting generalizations or conjectures about society as a whole. What do the denizens of L.A. or San Francisco tweet about most? What about women - what's got them buzzing? Read on for graphs on precisely that cross-section of the Twittersphere.
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My "I Heart L.A." list, a curation of tweets from the L.A. tech scene, shows a hilarious preoccupation with sex and a lack of tweeting about work, for example.
And my lengthy list of San Francisco/Bay Area people on Twitter gave evidence of a complete lack of interest in celebrities and a preoccupation with self, the future and control.
But when I looked at my "Southern Comfort" list of geeks south of the Mason-Dixon line, I got a very different picture. These folks are using the social web to tweet about their emotions, the passage of time, themselves and dreams of unconscious thoughts, while they tweet less than others about celebrities, sex and money.
When I looked at results for the list of women I follow, I saw they tweet a lot about sex, themselves, the past, anxiety and negative emotions, in that order. It was like watching an episode of Sex & the City flash before my eyes. They tweeted very little about money, learning, control (including self-control) and constructive behavior. Keep in mind, this isn't a generalization about the state of womanhood on the Internet; I follow a very limited and eclectic group of ladies, all of whom I find very charming in their own fashion.
Of course, I had to check out the stats on the ReadWriteWeb crew. We seem to tweet a lot about leisure and activities other than work. Uh, don't tell the boss? However, tweets about work finished a close third, right behind tweets about ourselves. As a group, we don't tend to tweet about personal things, such as money, sex or emotions.
Other interesting hypotheses can be drawn when examining "social media" and "technology" lists. Many geek-centric lists I examined were shockingly devoid of tweets about leisure, positive or other emotions or physical sensations and dominated by tweets about learning, the self and control. Perhaps this is due to our realization that the personal and professional are quickly merging and our perceived need to present a reasonably consistent face and least objectionable programming-type content.
At any rate, Zarrella's given us another insightful peek into how Twitter reveals interesting snippets of information about various demographics and sociological segments.
Give the new lists function a spin, and let us know your findings in the comments!
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