Tweeting from beyond the grave with LivesOn

A colleague at Queen Mary is doing some work analysing tweets and sent round a memo to the department that I'm in asking for people (who tweet regularly and have more than 700 tweets already in the bag) to help test the system. Since I have been tweeting for just over 5 years and have sent out thousands of the little messages I thought I could help, and also that it might be fun.

It seems pretty intuitive, to me at least, that given that I am constantly and consistently 'me' that my tweets must have a 'me-ish' quality that could probably be identified, captured in an algorithm and then exploited to produce further me-ish tweets. I think that's the aim.

The idea behind the LivesOn dot Org (website now something unrelated as of 2017) service is that, once you're kicking up the daisies, the system can still send tweets that sound like you - presumably as some sort of comfort to those left behind. You have to teach the system (with feedback) and it learns your likes, tastes and syntax.

Mine's been running for a few hours, at the beta site, and produced 9 tweets each of which are not that much like me (I think) but which have used words and phrases that I have previously used. It's a bit like taking three word excerpts from my previous tweets and recombining them to produce something fairly gibberish.

Fortunately the tweets come prepackaged with my name as a hashtag and the LivesOn handle, so hopefully it's reasonably clear that they're not from me directly - though I've only actually posted one 'live' on my timeline. Also, I'm not dead!

Here are 8 of the 9 tweets so far...