There’s a nice little write-up on Techcrunch today on the Hunch Twitter Predictor Game, a fun little quiz that asks you a series of questions and then predicts your answers to them, simply based on entering your Twitter account details.
In other words, the game profiles you according to your Twitter habits (who you follow, who follows you etc) and then predicts your answers to some questions – with surprising accuracy it seems (I’ve tried it with a friend and in both cases, Hunch guessed correctly over 90% of the time).
All this represents a pretty cool little diversion for a lunch break at work and will no doubt prove popular as any original spin-offs for Twitter are these days. However, what the Hunch game illustrates more pertinently is just how effectively certain bits of online personal data can be cross-collated to produce a remarkably accurate profile of your online (and possibly ‘real world’) self.
Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if Hunch’s principles and coding can be applied very lucratively not just to create this fun little game, but also to deliver highly specific targeted advertising to Twitter users. This in essence is where the game’s real relevance comes in, and it will be interesting to see if Hunch.Inc (which delivers a range of personalised recommendation services) can extend their idea to other sites that utilise social networking principles in a similar way.
For users of social networking sites, the conclusions are pretty clear – if you upload even seemingly inconsequential and trivial data, it nonetheless can prove very useful as a piece in the jigsaw construction of your online behaviour and personality.
If you are still not sure how to use Twitter, check out our Twitter for beginners guide and create the online presence as you wish.
This in itself is not a problem for many web users and I’m not going to try to convince you here that it should be – what is important to emphasise however is that there is no irrelevant personal data in the online world anymore for, as the tendency towards targeted advertising becomes the norm, such data is now becoming the single most essential component in the effective functioning of the online ad economy.
