Tweets are supposed to reveal your age – at
least that’s the assumption of the latest Twitter tool Tweetgenie.nl.
This Dutch app invites you to enter your Twitter-name
on Tweetgenie.nl. Computers at the Meertens Institute (a research center for
language and culture) and the University of Twente will start calculating. Your
last 200 tweets are benchmarked against a database with keywords related to youngsters,
the elderly, men and women.
Tweetgenie.nl is part of his research at the University of Twente.
On its website, the university explains: “We tried to identify the average
Dutch Twitter users. Of 3,000 users, we
manually indicate age and sex. This way, the program can estimate the sex and
age of each Twitter user."
The brain behind the software is linguistic scientist Nguyen. According
to him, identifying the sex of a twitterer is between 80 and 85 percent
accurate. Estimating age is trickier – it’s normally 4 years off.
He explained: "Above 30
- 35 years, it’s even more difficult. The difference between language of a 12-year
old and an 18-year old is much greater than that between a 40 and 50-year old."
According to the Meertens Institute, the results should provide
insight into patterns of how stories and rumors are spreading via social media.
This could be digital gold for marketers.
Want to try it out? Just fill in your twitter name and press the
check button. I tried it myself and was identified as a 39-year old man. Trust
me, I am very much female and at least a decade older……
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