What? We Don’t Want Sex? Love? Health? Just Food and Cars?

This morning I opened Mashable’s What Men and Women Really Want, According to Social Media, a fun info graphic. You can see the conclusions here, in my illustration. Mine is a tiny clip of their much larger infographic, which has a lot more information. infographic

This is a lot of fun. My conclusion, however, is that it’s only a lot of fun. Not great information.

The conclusion:

  1. The top three wants for both sexes are the same, just in different order.
  2. The top 10 lists for the sexes overlap by 70%.
  3. 80% of the items on both lists are food.

What? No sex? No health? No love? No longevity? No owning your own business?

I don’t know about you, but I’m not posting what I really want onto Twitter. I really don’t have that much need for sharing. Ice cream, maybe; a car, maybe; coffee, cookies, and all that, maybe. As long as it’s pretty much trivial, or it dresses me up in my business persona.

I really like the idea of mining large amounts of data to get past what people say about themselves and into what people actually do. Sales information and actual purchases, for example, tell me thousands of times more than what people say they want or plan to purchase.

But in this case, we’re talking about social media. And that’s publishing.

Question: are you putting real personal information into your social media feeds?

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