We do.

Tired of throwing sheep, hanging out with vampires and the like? Waiting for something to do on Facebook with your friends with some substance? If so, well, we think we have something you should check out.

We just released our Personality Patterns Facebook app; it’s based on our “Big Five” Personality test but completely integrated within Facebook. We’d gotten a lot of feedback from our SignalPatterns.com users asking for a way to post their own badge onto their Facebook profile. With the new app, we’ve created a cool new badge, highlighting your top traits so your friends can see your display and they can easily compare themselves to you.

If you’ve already taken the test on the site and have linked your Facebook account to your Signal Patterns account (if not, please do that first) simply add the app and you’re good to go. Your results will be there instantly and your badge will get posted automatically. If you’re new to Signal Patterns, you can take the test right within the app.

Within the app you can see all your Facebook friends, and how you compare to them by personality traits, how you’re most similar and where you’re most different. It could explain a lot!

However, one of the unique things is a way, we think, to really improve your use of Facebook. For most people, Facebook’s an online place to hang out with their friends but it’s not always so easy to discover new people, especially those with which you have something in common. With our new app, you can explore what we call ‘People Like You’ and discover people with a similar personality. And given you’re in Facebook, you can easily message them, friend them, or if you really want, throw a sheep at them!

Eugene is a really nice town, no doubt. Peaceful and quiet and known for the University of Oregon. Many people think that Matt Groening (who grew up in Oregon) based the hometown of The Simpsons on Eugene and the adjacent town, Springfield. I first visited Eugene in the spring of 2006 when I met with Lew Goldberg at the Oregon Research Institute. Lew and I spent a lot of time outdoors, walking and talking. At first, it just seemed like one of many nice places you run into, but something still seemed very different; I couldn’t exactly tell what it was.

Since then, almost every time I mentioned Eugene to someone I heard some exceptional story: the friend who stayed to work in a local laundromat after getting his PhD, the guy who came to see the Oregon Country Fair and stayed in town forever. I was in town to visit Lew again earlier this year, and was determined to get to the bottom of what is so special about the town. And here’s my simple conclusion: everyone is happy. Not that just nice, or smiling or any of that. They are genuinely happy. Very happy.

Here are a few examples:

• The taxi driver who picked me up at the airport has been in the army for many years. His mother keeps scolding him every Thanksgiving and Christmas when everyone sits at the dinner table and he starts foulmouthing like in the good old army days. And he is happy. Very happy. The source of is happiness is that he got a telemarketing call last week from the local cable company, and now he is getting Internet access, phone, and TV from them, and saving about $15 a month. In fact, he is even happier because he did not enroll in the Do Not Call registry, and expecting thrilling telemarketing calls to happen in the future as well.
• The girl in a small booth selling coffee on Franklin Blvd is very happy too. The reason? It’s a nice day. And to show how happy she is she is giving me one more espresso at no extra charge.
• The owner of the Italian restaurant is also very happy. He comes to sit with us at the table, and tells us a story about an envious husband who tried to shoot his wife’s lover 30 years ago in some other restaurant that is now an ice cream parlor. There’s still a bullet hole in the ceiling there. It’s a funny story and it makes him happy! (Starting to get the idea?)
• The taxi driver on the way back to the airport is an hour and a half late and is happy because he’s sure he can get me there on time.

How can 150,00 people be so happy? Eugene’s schools are good, but not stellar, there’s some level of crime, and in many respects it’s an average American town. It’s very green and environmentally conscious, and used to be a hippie stronghold in the 60s. None of that is too special.

The locals don’t have an explanation. Maybe it is simply an old fashioned and very strong sense of community. People there talk to each other. They talk to other people in stores and in restaurants, people who ride their cab, and even telemarketers who call them. Everywhere you go people will talk to you. If you turn on your laptop two blocks away from the University of Oregon you find that there is not a single WiFi network, not one. I guess communication in Eugene is much more direct.

Whoever cracks the Eugene mystery will be a very rich person. And if it’s something in the water, I want to drink some of it too.

Funny how little things can make a big difference. Even though it’s been a few months since we moved, something didn’t feel quite there until we had an official sign up by the reception. Doesn’t that feel like a real workplace now?

Personality assessment is based on the “study of individual differences“. But how different are people actually? Well - very different. Old school personality tests provide results in the form of a “type”: You may be a “gentlemen” or a “thoughtful leader”, or a “stressed out couch potato”. These old assessment instruments divide the human population into a small number of “buckets” and tells you what bucket you’re in. The Myers Briggs test, for example, uses 16 different possible personality types. That’s not very unique . Facebook currently has about 70 million active users and MySpace about 200 million. Assuming people are evenly distributed between the 16 types, you and almost 13 million MySpace users are the same type…

The scientific method Signal Patterns uses are “trait based” - they capture what characterizes people based on data collected from a large number of individuals. The Big Five personalty assessment framework captures the degree to which a person exhibits five main dimensions of personality. The Signal Patterns personality survey extends that level of detail to 45 traits, capturing subtle differences even between very similar individuals. It’s a long tail filter into the ocean of people that are online today.

Here is Signal Patterns scientist David Rosen’ take on this:

We’ve been talking up our upcoming beta for the last month or so and that can get old fast…so it’s time to at least start getting things out there. We had a successful period of internal or ‘alpha’ testing (friends & family), so last week we started a private beta to get a broader universe of folks banging on the site.

While we’re planning lots of surveys around multiple domains in the near term, we’re initially providing a personality survey and a music preferences survey. If you’re familiar with us, you’ll know we’re taking a somewhat different approach from some of the other survey/discovery type sites out there.

First, we’re providing a much greater level of detail that you’re likely used to seeing. Your individual personality is assessed on 45 distinct personality traits (based on Big Five Personality Theory) and your music preferences on 14 underlying music attributes (based on our proprietary FUSES(SM) model). You can see your results at that level, or at a less granular level, in the form of what we call a badge. Here’s mine for personality.

What we think is even more interesting is the social angle. We’re not looking to build a social network (think we’d all agree there are enough of those around!) but to leverage your existing “social graph” or your connections you’ve already established on sites like Facebook. With Signal Patterns, after you’ve reviewed your own results, you can then compare and contrast yourself to others - like your Facebook friends - and discover others with similar personalities or preferences: “People Like You.” Here’re some people with similar music preferences to, and how they’re different from, our CTO Giri.

We’re just scratching the surface in this post of what you can do on the site but hopefully this piques your interest enough to check it out. To join our private beta, follow this link and you can register. And most importantly, let us know what you think. Watch this space for more updates and/or check out (and join!) our Facebook page.

My two previous posts described Gladwell’s influencers, and posited that while family members make a big impact on our purchasing decisions, it was still worth our while to find these influencers. As for Duncan Watts’ theory—that some people have a disproportionate impact, but that it’s impossible to identify those people in advance—well, that’s a radical and fascinating perspective.

Gladwell’s position (as reported here) that we’re a young field, and we’re explaining small pieces of the variability in influence, is exceptionally similar to the thoughts that I expressed in my earlier blog post. Watts’ simulations are interesting, but none of them caused people to actually act, by purchasing something or going to a movie or voting for a candidate. Perhaps it takes a real-world influencer to make someone act on a preference—to bridge the gap between attitude and behavior. Connectors, Salesmen and Mavens are all action-oriented beings: their power comes not in their attitudes, but in their abilities to turn their attitudes into action, whether that action is social connection, market mastery, or persuasion.

In summary, influencers may not play the role that marketers have expected them to play, but they’re still worth finding. Even if Watts is correct—if social phenomena spread more randomly than anything—we’re still not wasting our time, as these people can still help spread trends once people are willing to accept them, and might also be able to guide general trends towards specific products or services. If he’s wrong, and influencers are still the kindling for wildfire-like spreads of information or action, then we don’t have to stop searching for them merely because many of them celebrate holidays with us.

(note: the image here is a representation of 30,000 random numbers from an interesting post on codinghorror.com)

Last October, Google launched an attack against the much vaunted Facebook platform by promising to be even more open with its own OpenSocial. It had also managed to assemble an impressive line-up of launch partners including MySpace. For a while it seemed as if the world had split into two camps — Facebook and the rest of the world. It seemed as if yet again, Google had pulled the rug under someone with its stellar execution and superior technology. Or had it?

Fast forward just a few months later to Spring 2008. Pretty much every one of the launch partners is announcing its own proprietary extensions to the standard. It seems OpenSocial is fast becoming the lowest common denominator — a spot it shares with many such poorly executed standardization efforts. Clearly there is huge consumer benefit if there are open standards in this space. A walled garden is not the right model. But, as OpenSocial partners and application developers (including us) quickly discovered, each of these networks caters to a different user base and serves different needs — from the attention-challenged MySpace to the staid LinkedIn. So, in practice, the promise of write-once, run-anywhere will not be possible with OpenSocial. As an application developer, I am forced to design my MySpace application differently from my LinkedIn application.

A better model that is emerging is exemplified by applications such as LivingSocial, Chirp and ours (See a sneak peek below). Each of these applications is offering a valuable service and does not require you to be logged into the various Social Networks. You get to share your information and get updates from friends no matter where you are — just like you IM with friends in AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber or MSN using either a multi-protocol chat client or through gateways that allow you communicate with friends elsewhere. Users will not remain stuck in a walled garden and will cruise wherever they want to, however they want to. Then, and only then, should Open and Social be mentioned together.

“We barely had TV when I was growing up.”
“Really? So you must have been on the internet all the time then…”

This was just one of the highlights from our West Coast trip last week. Though we’re deep in developing our social web applications (coming real soon!), a colleague and I took a quick detour last week to go to the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego.

It was a great opportunity to meet and learn from a number of the leading players in the social networking space: Facebook, MySpace, Google (Open Social), application builders and users, and social ad networks, among others.

Forrester’s Charlene Li had one of the more interesting talks. She started things off with a simple concept: “Social networks will be like air.”

They’re becoming so commonplace (if you have kids, is Webkinz not your top bookmark?) that they’re just part of the environment…nothing special. Heat, food, Facebook?

Coming down the road in the not too distant future she sees data portability and then ubiquitous social networks emerging. But what do people do on social networks today? Certainly a big chunk is collecting ‘friends’ and wasting time playing lots of basic, simplistic games. The novelty of the plethora of available applications is still new, and there’s certainly lots of interest based simply on these applications’ existence, rather than any compelling value or true insight being shared. But I thing we can all agree we’re in the early innings of this game.

One of Charlene’s recommendations was to “compete on creating the most compelling social media experience, not social graph lock-in.” We couldn’t agree more. Our social web applications will leverage your existing social graph, wherever it is, while adding value to your time online and presenting opportunities for you off-line. Walled gardens, silos, whatever you call it - that just doesn’t fly anymore.

She added that you need to “develop social applications that have meaning.” Exactly. The voracious appetite for the volume of simplistic Facebook and other networks’ applications will likely wear thin and users will instead focus on a few solid applications that provide a real value-add to their social networking (whether on-line or off-).

This was good to hear. Compelling experience and apps with meaning. Sounds like a plan.

The new year has brought a lot of excitement here at Signal Patterns. In addition to moving to new, larger digs to support our growing team, we’ve launched a new website. But don’t get too comfortable w/it just yet!

Over the last year, we’ve spent quite a bit of time on the engineering and design front, based on our research team’s work and all the volunteers who’ve helped us. So shortly, we’ll be launching a major self-discovery and social networking product across our site that we believe you’ll find quite compelling and innovative. You’ll be able to learn a lot more about yourself but also use that information to engage with your existing friends as well as develop new ones.

In the interim, we invite you to sign up on our Facebook page to become part of the Signal Patterns community.

And for those who’d like to participate in our research and help beta test our upcoming products, please sign up on our contact list.

Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective [dating] partners that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases…. It amused us at the time… But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently…

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

For Rob, Dick, and Barry music was everything. From the moment they woke up to the second they fell asleep they listened to music, thought about it, and talked about it. Thus, it is no surprise why they supposed that a questionnaire asking about such things as music preferences would highlight valuable information about the character of a person. As it turns out, music aficionados are not the only ones who hold this belief. In fact, a rapidly growing body of research on folk theories of music reveals that many people believe music reflects important aspects of their personalities and the personalities of others.

The idea that the type of music people listen to can reveal important information about their personalities appears justified. Several empirical studies in music psychology have identified connections between the styles of music people like listening to and a range of personality traits. For example, die-hard rock and metal fans tend to have high scores on measures of sensation seeking. This means that people who enjoy “living on the edge”—who engage in risky and sometimes life threatening recreational activities—also enjoy listening to intense and somewhat rebellious styles of music. People who love listening to jazz and classical music tend to have high scores on measures of open mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, and need for cognition. This means that people who enjoy engaging in abstract thought and who take pleasure in “wild flights of fancy” tend to listen to music that may, in some respects, be regarded as vague, complex, and intellectual. Fans of rap and dance music tend to have high scores on measures of Extraversion and social dominance. This means that people who enjoy being around others and who place a lot of importance on social status enjoy listening to energetic music, music they we might say encourages extraverted behavior.

Given that there are connections between the styles of music people listen to and their personalities, it is reasonable to suppose that people with similar music preferences may be more likely to get along and enjoy happy relationships than people with radically different preferences for music.

In a recent study concerned with music preferences among adolescents, a team of researchers from the Netherlands found that close friends were more likely to share similar preferences for music than were less intimate friends. Moreover, friends with the most similar music preferences were more likely to remain friends three years later than were friends with less similar music preferences.

Another study concerned with the links between music preferences and relationship satisfaction focused on music-preference similarity among university roommates living in the US. The roommates who participated in the study completed several surveys, including a personality questionnaire, a music preference measure, and a few questions about how much they enjoyed living with their roommate and whether they would choose to live with them the following year. The results showed that roommates with similar personalities were no more likely to enjoy their living arrangement than were roommates with different personalities. However, roommates with similar music preferences enjoyed more pleasant and satisfying relationships and reported a stronger desire to continue living together than did roommates with different music preferences. Closer inspection of the results indicated that roommates with similar preferences for rap and dance music, and similar preferences for classical and jazz music were the most likely to enjoy their living situations. Furthermore, students tended to segregate themselves into dorms with other students that tended to match their music preferences than any of the other characteristics measured in the study.

Why do people with similar music preferences enjoy such happy and satisfying relationships? Based on research documenting connections between music preferences and personality, we know that the styles of music people listen to are related to their values, political views, and leisure preferences. That is, people who like the same music are more likely to have similar attitudes about religion and politics and they’re more likely to spend their time pursuing similar interests: J.D. Salinger or Danielle Steel? MTV or HGTV? Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh? People who like listening to the same music will agree more often about a range of things than will people whose record collections disagree violently. With less tension, there is more harmony.