how neurotic R U? xxx

You can tell a lot about someone by how and what they txt. What percentage of your txts say "sorry", "I can't", "oops" or "be late" ?

Do you get friends who only ever SMS you to ask for stuff? Or what about nice ones who text you out the blue to ask how you're feeling? Or who do you always cancel on, and who you send the most X's to?

I just had this idea for an application which scans all your text messages, and does two things:

1. By looking at how many times you use phrases and words like "I'm so", "thanks", "can you", "help", "disaster" and so on, it will give you a personality test, something like this one, (taken from a Facebook questionairre-based personality test):




It could also give you charts and graphs of how miserable or elated you've been over time, based on how many sad or happy faces you've used, or how many exclamation points you use.


2. It would also tell you loads about your relationships with your contacts - it would tell you who your emotional dumping ground is, who always says nice things to you and who texts you loads and whom you never reply to.

It could display all in this in a cool visual way, like a big graphy chart thing, or in a very cutesy neoprint way with halos, devil horns, to appeal to younger audiences.


some neoprints - those Japanese photo booths for kids that print cute stickers of you and your friends


For the technically minded amongst you, you could do in a few ways

* a Java app that you download to your mobile phone

* for mobile operators with web services that let users see their call and text data, it could sit on the web portal

* it could also work for email - be a plug in for Outlook express, or scrape of your gmail, or even be a Facebook widget, seeing who's wall you post on, and what you say, and displaying a readout on your profile


It would get really interesting if the data was all mashed together from different users - it could tell you what the difference in texting habits across nations was, or who the most apologetic person in the UK was!

I think this is a nice idea because it appeals to both typical gender stereotypes:

* geeky boys like anything that crunches numbers and shows them as stats and graphs of things, and visual maps

* girls love doing quizzes about personalities and especially about the relationships between their friends

(I know these are awful stereotypes, but if you look at a lot of MySpace pages and blogs you find lots of evidence that these are kinds of content that are more prevalent to each gender).

If anyone wants to build it give me a shout!

kerry katona burgled, an idea

Kerry Katona, of Atomic Kitten and Iceland ads fame, was threatened at knifepoint whilst masked men ransacked her home.

Link to the BBC news article

This is obviously not a nice thing to happen to anyone, but I am guessing that a lot people out there will have very little sympathy, purely because she's rich and some people find her annoying.

The BBC article is a bit loaded too -

"Police have removed a Porsche and an Aston Martin from the front of the property.

The cars are to be forensically examined to see if the robbers left any clues when they stole the BMW which was also parked at the house."

- this isn't necessary, and just creates vitriol - why does a family need a Porsche, Aston and BMW anyway?

Anyway, my thought was, is that say the robbers anonymously stated what they'd be using the money for a worthy cause? Like a modern day Robin Hood. I wonder what level of support they would garner from the public?

If they only targeted easily hatable celebrities - for example:

Stealing money from Pete Doherty, to give to drug abuse charities

Stealing one of Jeremy Clarkson's large-engined cars and selling it to pay for solar water heating in developing nations?



I also wonder what the media reaction to them would be like. Since I wouldn't advocate crime in any way, would there be any legal and less extreme ways to do this?

For example, a TV show where aggravating celebs go on trial for their excessive ways and get made to change their behaviour or face fines?

With all respect to celebs, our world is facing a basic problem of everyone in the West leading excessive, wasteful lives, that no amount of recycling plastic bags is going to solve. We need to work out a way of making irresponsible excess, and those who glamourise it, uncool.