This web tool can learn your personality by reading your Facebook posts

On Facebook, are you a grumpy know-it-all who disagrees with people, or an extrovert who lets everyone know what you’re up to? If you’re not sure, don’t fret – a web tool now lets you see just what your status updates reveal about your personality. The intuitive site analyses words from your posts to show you what sort of person you are, and then compares your traits with friends and celebrities. The tool is called Five Labs and predicts users’ personalities based on their Facebook posts. It was built as a demonstration of how today’s public social networks can analyse user content, according to the company.

A social media startup called Five wants to give us a new way of communicating with our friends that’s more akin to a dinner table conversation than it is to shouting to one another across a crowded restaurant. In order to illustrate why it thinks a change is in order, the company has released a tool called Five Labs that analyzes Facebook users’ vocabularies and assigns personality profiles based on them. It’s Five’s way of showing that even though we might be directing most of our social media posts to just a few people, someone else is always listening, taking notes and passing judgment. Five Labs is based on the World Well-Being Project, a study out of the University of Pennsylvania that correlated the language people use on social media sites (more than 700 million words, phrases and topics) with the results of personality tests they took. When users sign into Five Labs with their Facebook info, it analyzes their wall posts and their friends’ posts, assigning a five-factor personality profile for each and showing which friends are most similar.