Put your personality to the test with new online tool

A new analytical tool can measure how others perceive your personality using nothing more than Facebook posts and compare the results with those of a-list stars and even world leaders.

A new analytical tool can measure how others perceive your personality using nothing more than Facebook posts and compare the results with those of a-list stars and even world leaders.

The fun tool, developed by Five and called Five Labs, has been created in part to show how technology is improving language analysis, and of course to highlight its growing importance.

We're usually more than happy to tap at virtual keys on a screen in order to text a friend or search the web, but, as voice recognition becomes better and more commonplace, we'll want our devices not only to understand what we've said, but how we've said it. Are we happy, sad, being sarcastic or being coerced?

But that's the future; in the meantime there's Five Labs. Its artificial intelligence analysis of your personality is based on the world's largest language study -- the University of Pennsylvania's Worldwide Well-Being Project -- and one of its key researchers, H. Andrew Schwartz, is an advisor on the project. It positions a person's personality around five key traits - Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness.

It measures Facebook posts for levels of these five markers and the final result - inventive and outgoing, or curious and secure or restless and analytical - can be compared to anyone else on Facebook, provided their posts are public. So anyone from Mark Zuckerberg himself to Justin Bieber and a host of celebrities in between.

Five stresses that anyone who wants to put their personality to the test can do so with confidence -- no data is stored and as soon as the analysis is completed, any information gathered is immediately dumped again.

The company has launched the tool in the lead up to taking the wraps off an app that is focused on creating private social experiences and it hopes that the personality test will make people think about how their social data could be mined for everything from targeted ads to business intelligence.

"Think of this as a personality snapshot," suggests co-founder Nikita Bier. "It's all for fun," he adds, "but we're also hoping to educate. People need to ask themselves a profound question: 'how does my data portray me on public networks—and how might that be used?'"