This seems like it would be useful for advertising, but it probably won't be. It's still difficult to link a social profile to a particlar web page view. Google and Facebook have a lot of information about everyone but they still have trouble linking it up all around the web.
I think the real value is in making predictions. Many of the things that really matter to businesses, like the stock market, government and judicial system depend heavily on human personalities. Having a better guess at what a CEO will do is valuable. Predicting what the Fed will do is even more so. There are countless boards, commitees and commissions that make influential decisions every day. Having just a slightly better idea about their actions will be based on their personalities can make a huge difference.
As the article points out, the biggest problem is that there is usually a gap between what people tweet and what they really think. The author's twitter feed was more about his persona as an online journalist than his own personal life. Many people communicate socially as who they want to be rather than who they actually are. Google could probably find out more about someone's true personality from the pages that they visit rather than the words that they use.
This technology still has great promise. One thing algorithms aren't good at is understanding the quirks of human behavior. Anything that addresses that problem moves us closer to an automated world.
> the biggest problem is that there is usually a gap between what people tweet and what they really think
I think that's a great feature, not a bug. Thank God there are aspects to our personalities that algorithm cannot predict based on just a few hundred tweets or posts.
I doubt this would be used for analysing personalities of key decisionmakers. It's applications lie in the possibility of automated (if crude) analysis of millions of people. For targeted analysis used to aid high-impact decisions, analysis done by humans will always (until we reach human-level AI) be a better tool.
I think the real value is in making predictions. Many of the things that really matter to businesses, like the stock market, government and judicial system depend heavily on human personalities. Having a better guess at what a CEO will do is valuable. Predicting what the Fed will do is even more so. There are countless boards, commitees and commissions that make influential decisions every day. Having just a slightly better idea about their actions will be based on their personalities can make a huge difference.
As the article points out, the biggest problem is that there is usually a gap between what people tweet and what they really think. The author's twitter feed was more about his persona as an online journalist than his own personal life. Many people communicate socially as who they want to be rather than who they actually are. Google could probably find out more about someone's true personality from the pages that they visit rather than the words that they use.
This technology still has great promise. One thing algorithms aren't good at is understanding the quirks of human behavior. Anything that addresses that problem moves us closer to an automated world.