Unfortunately, I don’t have anything witty to say tonight, but instead I’ll share Hunch’s Twitter predictor with you. Hunch is a site that I mentioned a while back on The Modern World (which I should really do a new episode of at some point…) that is designed to crowdsource decisional questions — answer things like “What should I eat for dinner?” by seeing what people before you in the same situation chose.

They’ve hooked their system up to Twitter, and if you type in your username (it’s safe, they won’t steal your account or anything), they’ll check out your followers (and maybe your tweet text, but I’m not sure about that I just saw on the bottom of their page that they don’t — it’s only follower information), and then they’ll try to predict how you’ll answer a series of questions. In other words, they’ll ask if you are good at computers, and if you have a lot of techies in your “circle,” it’ll guess that you are.

I ran through the quiz twice (once with my username, and once by putting in someone else’s twitter username — shh, don’t tell them), and it’s pretty interesting. While they make some pretty broad strokes (“Are you a liberal or conservative?”), there are some interesting questions in there (“Are you more extroverted or introverted?” and “Do you consider yourself traditional or original and inventive?”). And more often than not, Hunch did indeed guess correctly about me, though there was the occasional secret (how could they know that I secretly prefer chick lit over sci fi?) about me that they didn’t guess correctly.

And of course, as you answer, the survey updates itself, so that at this point, they’re hitting correct on most of their answers. It’s just a cute online test to most of us, but I’ll tell you who’d really be interested in this information: Advertisers. Twitter follower information is publicly available (at least it is for me — private accounts may not be), and if an advertiser plugged my information into a service like Hunch, they’d have a pretty good idea, even without getting my consent, about the kinds of things I like to spend money on and the kinds of things I am interested in. That’s the real secret of Hunch’s database: the more of this kind of stuff advertisers know about you, the more they can get you to agree with.

Is Hunch selling this information? I don’t think so, but there’s nothing to stop them, and in fact Twitter might even want to pick them up (and/or is probably running something like this already), since they’re rolling out their advertising plans soon. But in the meantime, it just shows you how much information about you is encoded into these social networks you join and frequent. There’s a whole library of information that can be learned about you and who you are simply by seeing who you’re connected to and how.