Is there a hyper Myers-Briggs in the making

If you think about your links to other people as strings in a spider’s web – a pretty well used metaphor, I know – then, some are strong (friends, enemies), some weak (acquaintances, friends of friends, and so on).

Every year, the web grows. There are limits to how many people you can keep track of, in terms of cognitive psych/working memory/etc, but increasingly people are borrowing from marketers and using technology (e.g. social applications like Twitter) to keep abreast of larger groups.

All this information is stored on big computers. Who you’re friends with, and how often you interact with them, and who you’re not interacting with. I know, there have been whole newspapers devoted to the risks of putting your details online, but I’m talking about more sophisticated mining of that data.

Social networks are becoming more visible – through all those apps you can find on Mashable, but also through data collected by internet service providers, the post office (increasingly focussed on marketing), telcos, government departments.

By mining all that data, you could pick out the mess of links between people – how often you call a particular friend, what you said about another, geographical proximity, and so on – to work out what sort of person you are. What sort of people annoy you, which ones charm you, how often you like to interact (i.e. how social are you?), and so on.

It’s like a Myers-Briggs assessment taken much deeper. Looking at the kind of person you are by the kind of people you interact with and the relationships you have with them. Scary, but far from far-fetched. The data’s there, I’m sure, but modelling of interactions between so many individuals would be a massive undertaking – if you think about there being six degrees of separation between anyone on the planet, then the number of actors in this exercise jumps very fast.

Imagine though, all the magic and heartache of our relationships demystified in a single run through the data.