The basic idea:
- Humans look for patterns and meaning in everything. When they don't find these things, they make them up.
- Humans like to share trite, generic advice online.
- Probably selected tweets collaged together could sometimes be as meaningful as a "real" horoscopes?
This site generates a horoscope based on tweets
The live tweet view shows a selection of tweets pulled from a live twitter search and lightly filtered. The search is made using two random horoscope keywords to turn up tweets that have a horoscope sound. Then, each tweet is filtered to screen for forbidden words, remove noise like links and @s, and generally clean things up.
My original idea was to search for these tweets on the fly and then compose them into longer horoscope texts, but I found two problems with this approach:
- Obvi there are a lot of different kinds of conversations on twitter, and I found that even with my horoscope keywords, a lot of tweets I found contained content that didn't match aesthetically with my idea.
- The time it took to find and filter tweets, and then load them into a Markov chain, and then generate a horoscope text was non-trivial.
In the expanded view, you can see longer horoscope texts. These are based on tweets I found through the method above, as well as real horoscope texts. The output is composed using a markov chain.