Are you a facebook user? How about other social-networking sites? Twitter? Linkedin? How about MyUMBC and our "paw" system?

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal really brought things home for me. Not that I use facebook much. I deleted my account and then exploded it about 6 months ago, in large part because I never used the thing and honestly, if I'm going to waste time, I'd rather do it on here chatting with the MyUMBC forumites.

Awww, doesn't that make you feel loved?

But I digress. This study out of the UK's Cambridge university found that, as far as revealing somebody's personality goes, looking at the patterns of likes in someones social-networking is as good as any personality test. Here's the highlight from the article.

The researchers found, for example, that "Likes" for Austin, Texas, "Big Momma" movies and the statement "Relationships Should Be Between Two People Not the Whole Universe," were among a set of 10 choices that, combined, predicted drug use. Meanwhile, "Likes" for swimming, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and "Sliding On Floors with Your Socks On" were part of a pattern predicting that a person didn't use drugs.

Based only on "Likes," the researchers distinguished between Democrats and Republicans in 85% of the cases; between black and white Americans in 95% of the cases; and between gay and straight men in 88% of the cases.

So what do your likes say about you? too much? These patterns of likes could be pure gold for advertisers. It's no doubt a big concern for privacy... revealing deeper aspects of our personality than we may not want to share. Or maybe we do... after all, you're the one pressing the like button.

But that's kinda scary. So let's have a little fun. I would like everybody here to list 5 things they have "liked" in the last 6 months. I would then like other forumites to discern what those "likes" might mean, followed by a comfirmation or denial by the person who made the post.

C'mon, it'll be fuuuun.