A group of a researchers at Cornell and Carnegie Mellon have devised a nifty - or alarming, depending on how you look at it - algorithm that trawls through your tweets and uses them to decipher your life story accordingly. According to the MIT Technology Review, the algorithm looks at a user’s own tweets and interactions, as well as those of their followers, to devise a timeline of their life.
Professors Jiwei Li of Carnegie Mellon and Claire Cardie of Cornell say the method works by first classifying tweets into one of four categories - personal, nonpersonal, time-general, and time-specific - and then determining which of those tweets are the most important and revealing about a person’s life.
"It can be extended to any individual, (e.g. friend, competitor or movie star), if only he or she has a twitter account," say Li and Cardie.
It’s no easy task, they concede, especially for users who tweet irregularly and mostly about nonpersonal things, but the result is apparently a chronological map of a life lived in tweets. There’s no word yet on when, or whether, the algorithm will become available to the public, and that’s probably a good thing.
[via Mashable]
