Twitter Personalities

Twitter, twitter, twitter, is there something that wasn't said about twitter? Maybe... I don't know if someone categorized the type of people using twitter, so I'm giving it a try...

People:

The Conformist:

He likes to think of himself as an early adopter... But not really, he uses twitter just because he heard so much about it from so many people, and he decided to signup. He doesn't really care for it, so he follows a few people and writes down a twit every few days at most, after a month he forgets about his account.

 

The Smart Opportunistic:

Joined twitter because he has an agenda. He wants to promote his blog, business, political agenda or whatever. He keeps on spreading information about his agenda (in a subtle way), he tries not to get caught as a spammer, so he keeps following other people too - but never read a word they say.

The Stupid opportunistic:

He is very similar to the opportunistic, but in a stupid way. He also delivers his agenda in a subtle way, but other people don't pay much interest to him because he is not smart enough to care about his followers-following ratio.

The Egocentric:

His only goal is to have as many followers as possible, even if he has no interest to follow a person he will follow him to get him to follow him as well. He doesn't wait more than a day to remove a person from his list if that person didn't follow him, in order to keep the followers-following ratio stable.

The Chatter:

He is not interested in reading or spreading links to the coolest things, or the hottest news. He just wants to chat with his buddies on everyday things. He feels that twitter is his new replacement for emails or IM.

 

 

The Autobiographer:

What he does all day is tell the world approximately every 10 minutes what he is doing. He has no interest in other people, he has only the need to share his everyday accomplishments. (Such as riding a bus, eating pizza and etc...).

The spammer:

He doesn't care at all about what is going on, he just keep on following people like there is no tomorrow. He has the worst followers-following ratio. Since he opened his account he created approximately 1-3 twits and no more, to make the appearance of a real user... He gets you all excited for a new follower until you understand he is just another spammer.

The Early Adopters:

They have been here from the beginning, telling themselves this is the next big thing. They keep a happy count of how many times twitter is down, in the last few weeks they are unhappy because twitter is up most of the time.

The Stalker:

He is searching twitter to find real celebrities. He likes to collect them and tries (but fails) to bask in their reflected glory.

The one twit people:

Opened an account after reading an article in Techcrunch, really loved the concept of twitter and even filled a short bio and posted a twit. Never came back...

The Re-Twitter:

He is a person of ethics. When he finds something he likes in his feed (Submitted by a person he follows), he wont pass it on as his own as he is a person of high ethics, he will always give the honor to that person by mentioning him in the form of a Re-Twit.

The heavy blogger:

He thinks he is a king walking among his many loyal subjects. He greets them in his special way when he wakes up or go to sleep. He always chooses who to reply or who to ignore. He has 10-50 times more followers than people he is following. Beside spreading links to his new blog post he likes to share his occasional words of wisdom.

The Casual twitter:

For him twitter is just another platform, he doesn't really pay attention to twitter articles or to his followers-following ratio, but it is always a reasonable ratio. He has a few buddies here, a few Celebs and a few opinion leaders. He is probably the only twitter user who reads his entire feed.

Companies:

The "Opportunity to get Cheap advertisement" Company:

Probably a company that heard about the "New age" of viral advertisement and web2.0, and would like to exploit twitter to gain free advertisement, and to be able to say to its investors that they are into web2.0.

The web2.0 Company:

A web2.0 company is all about what is Now. so there is no way they didn't open a twitter account. Most of the times the twitter account looks like their chances for an exit...

The Hip CEO:

Probably a company that its CEO still didn't pass the age of 35 (sometimes even 25), and uses twitter in a good way to be in touch with its customers. Their account is more similar to a chatter account than to the opportunistic account, they sometime have the tendency to forget to talk about their own company.

The Company's "Cover" account:

They don't use the company name, instead they pretend like it is a real user spreading links from their web site (and never other links) and they use the account as any of the opportunistic characters. Most of the time they are so obvious it hurts...

News and Feed Bots:

Rarely helpful, and commonly suffocate your feed with an overdose of very not interesting links.

I hope you can find yourself there, but I guess all of us are a mixture of some of these types. If you have any additions, corrections , suggestions, or a twitter account that fits one of these types feel free to leave a comment.

Oh yes almost forget..., follow me on twitter :)

I would like to share with you an interesting game I read about in an interesting blog of an interesting person Dan Ariely.

A virtual reality game called "Snow world" was created to reduce the pain of burn victims, by giving the patients a snowy virtual world to wonder in. This psychological experience reduced their pains and the need for pain relief medication. You can read more about it in the Sciencentral article.

This is an amazing idea. Finally a good use for VR... The fact that the virtual world the burn victims play in is a snowy one is not really what matters that much (I presume) but the fact that the patients get the chance to place their mind in another place, far away from the pain. This is a really good use to games, which have the tendency to make you forget about the real life... (ask my wife)

Is the global economy situation really got you depressed? We all joke about it, but for some people it might be a real concern.

Now you can test yourself (Maybe just to reduce some tension that not all is bad or maybe to wake up and and go talk to somebody before things get worse)

Keep in mind one important thing - This test is based on the predominant symptoms of major depressive disorder as listed in the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Fourth Edition. This is the generally accepted manual for diagnosing psychiatric disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association). 

Please use the results of this test as a guide and not a diagnosis, only a licensed mental health practitioner can diagnose depression. 

Have "Fun"... Take the test.

I wrote about the Evolution of Auto Complete a few posts ago, This post is about the best Auto Complete I have ever seen (I Don't know how I forgot about this one, shame on me! :).

Read the text in the picture below:

Source: http://www.friends.hosted.pl/redrim/Reading_Test.jpg

Our brain is such an amazing auto-complete tool, and I always get excited to see great Priming effects. Our brain already seen these words in the past, and due to that he is able to re-create the correct word even though the word is all mixed up. Pay attention that the first and last letters of the word are in their correct location, to give the relevant clues for our brain to re-create the word (Top Down processes)

I read an interesting blog post on the article "Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception" in The mouse trap blog.

In general the experiment described in the article found that "Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions".

The blog post took the article conclusions in to one direction, and I want to take it in another. From brief reading, the article made me think of a creativity and not psychosis... Illusions, imagining things, conspiracies and etc... these can all be examples of creative thinking, and high imagination. To be able to create things from nothing requires a lot of creativity.

Think about it, it might be good to feel lack of control, we don't need to control everything or be afraid of loosing control. Sometimes it is good to flow to where life takes you.  

Next time when you are trying to think of a creative solution to something, or to discover the next big thing, think about it.

As a cognitive psychologist I found this video very funny and interesting. Dan Dennett, a philosopher and a cognitive scientist, puts our Mind & Conscious on the spot light, and by experimenting with some clever "mind tricks", he shows us that what we see, is just what our mind wants to see.

Some questions arise from the lecture:

• Does the mind have a will of its own?
• Why do we see things in a certain way and not the other?

The lecture doesn't fully answer all of that, but it gives you a lot to think when you observe the world, and all the information out there that our mind "decide to see" and more interesting what it ignores.

My 2 cents:

The world we see out there, is the world "we" decided we want to see, but we decide to see only part of it, not for no reason.

The world is too complex for our brain to understand, too much information to process at once, this is why our mind filter things and interfere with the way we "see". I guess that in time, we will be able to process more and more information, to really experience the world and its wonders.

But for now, lets just keep an open mind.