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!

brands as filling narrative gaps in our lives

Nice quote from Charlie Brooker at the Guardian. He's talking about Macs and PCs, specifically the new UK Mitchell and Webb ones and how much he hates it. It's a great article, but anyway my favourite part is just about brands in general:

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose.

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality.

Well said. It's diametrically opposed to Hugh MacLeod's statement that we use brands to fill up gaps in our personal stories, and basically says a big NO to consumer brand marketing. I quite like it today, because it's a Monday and I feel like sticking it to the man.