Signal Patterns
Signal Patterns is a NY-based, angel-financed firm developing social web applications that characterize and connect users to each other based on their interests, personality and preferences.
With these applications, users can discover more about themselves as well as make connections to like-minded individuals, while content sites and social networks can increase their own user engagement.
Our patent-pending technology results from a unique combination of in-house behavioral science research and data mining expertise. Want to know more about us? It’s all here.
From our perspective, it’s an application that runs on a website, accessible from your browser (as opposed to a “traditional” software application that you install on your own computer) that provides some degree of online social functionality or interactivity.
What is it?
Our applications enable you to discover details about your personality, interests and preferences at an extraordinarily level of detail, and in an easy to grasp visual and interactive way. That’s the “web application” part. As to the “social” part, we leverage your existing connections (e.g. your Facebook friends) so you can compare yourself to them, uncover similarities and differences, and discover possible new connections based on specified traits and preferences.
Our applications begin by either asking you some questions, or presenting you with a few sample music or video clips. These questions or clips come from the latest scientific research in the field of personality theory and media preferences. Our surveys are designed to be short, yet highly informative about your traits and preferences. Typically, it takes 2-5 minutes to answer these and never more than 15 minutes for our most extensive survey.
Based on your individual results, we build a statistical model that gets translated into a visual representation of you. This personalized feedback, for each survey you take, takes the form of a Flash animation, at an unparalleled level of depth and visualization. Each is totally interactive and we think you’ll find them quite engaging. You can click on individual items and learn more about each trait (or preference). You can even “tweak” the animation and find other people that match those traits (or preferences).
First, you can learn a lot about yourself. We have a strong focus on self-discovery, so you get a unique visual representation (what we call a “pattern”) of your personality or music preferences. We’ll be adding a lot more subject areas soon.
Second, we let you take what you’ve learned about yourself, and see how you compare to your friends. How are you the same? How are you different? Which friends are most similar to you personality-wise, music-wise, etc? Are you more focused? Are you less empathetic?
Third, we enable you to find new people either similar to you (in personality or music preferences for example) or to find people based on any set of specific attributes you wish. For example, I want to find someone like my friend who’s less excitable and carefree and more creative and captivating. This allows you to truly harness the power of social networks by identifying new people and having a common basis to do so.
Not really…we pull just about everything in from your existing profiles on Facebook, MySpace or whatever social network you’re part of already. We know no one wants another yet another profile to maintain.
Not at all. Have you seen most of them? We have. Most sites and surveys are either over simplistic, simply label you (and anyone else remotely similar) into broad-based ‘buckets’ or basically just repeat back to you what you told them. And comparing yourself to others? You’re an “AB’ and she’s an ‘XY’ – somewhat interesting but not that helpful; in fact, you probably already knew that!
We’ve spent a lot of energy to make sure that we’re providing you scientifically valid results in an engaging and interactive way. No one else provides the level of detail, across multiple subject areas, using your existing social networks like we do. If you have any experience with other sites and the limited feedback available, we think you’ll see the difference with Signal Patterns.
No; Signal Patterns is not a social network like Facebook or MySpace, requiring you to collect a whole new set of 'friends.' We leverage your existing social networks profiles and your existing Facebook or MySpace friends (your "social graph" as the bloggers now call it).
How everything works
Easy. After you’re registered, just click here and you can pull in your friends’ addresses from your email service (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and invite them to join Signal Patterns. Alternatively, when you see their thumbnail pictures under “Your Connections,” you can invite them to join so they can learn about themselves and you can compare yourself to each other.
Your friends on other social networks that also join Signal Patterns can see your profile and compare themselves with you on their musical preferences, personality traits, etc. Any Signal Patterns user can see your profile. Shortly, we will be giving you the option to make parts of your profile private, visible to friends only or visible to anyone in Signal Patterns. People who are not Signal Patterns users will not be able to see your complete profile.
Absolutely. Our research team is actively work across numerous sectors, developing surveys that will be rolling our across our own site and partner sites in the coming months. If there are particular subject areas you think we should address, please let us know.
There are number of ways to do this:
- Direct them to your SignalPatterns.com profile
- Embed your individual badge(s) (that display your own results) on your blog, personal website, etc. You can do this simply via the “Show Your Patterns” box on your different Survey Results pages
- Add the Signal Patterns applications to your Facebook or MySpace profile where you can display your badge
Exactly! After you take any survey (personality, music, etc.) you’ll see “Your Connections” (e.g. your Facebook friends) and others (“People Like You”) that are most similar to you. Each person will be identified by a thumbnail picture and what’s called a dyadic comparison – basically a specific comparison between two people highlighting differences such as ‘more cautious’ or ‘less authoritative.’ If you want to dig deeper, clicking on someone’s picture lets you identify her top traits (or attributes) that are most similar or most different to you (or anyone else).
Personality Patterns
Our research team has spent countless hours researching Big Five Personality theory and developing detailed surveys that enable us to pinpoint 45 individual traits. After taking a fun and interesting survey, your results are instantly scored. With your results, we’re able to measure the relevant prominence of all your individual traits (or preferences) and visually display them to you.
Music Patterns
The Music Patterns test started with thousands of songs from different cultures and eras. We figured most people wouldn't have the time or energy to report their preference for every single one of those songs, so we were faced with the task of figuring out which songs to include. Several criteria were used to make that decision, including the popularity of the song and its genre. We didn't want songs that most people were familiar with because then people's preferences might have more to do with the memories associated with the song than with the music itself (the "old boy/girlfriend problem"). We did, however, want music that covered a wide variety of different musical styles so that we could identify which styles of music people like most, and equally important, which styles people like least.
Of course, the musical space is enormous and it's not possible to have a test that covers our ever expanding musical universe. To solve that problem, we drew on years of research in music psychology and relied on rigorous scientific methods to identify the dimensions of music preferences – or clusters of music preferences and the musical characteristics that define each of them. With these music dimensions, we’re able to approximate the musical universe without covering it entirely. This enables us to assess people's preferences for music with significantly fewer songs. So even though the Music Patterns test doesn't cover every single style of music ever produced, there is empirical evidence that the majority of musical styles fit within the dimensions we have identified.
The Music Patterns test was designed to produce an accurate assessment of people's music preferences. Identifying someone's music preferences involves figuring out what a person likes and what a person doesn't like. For instance, if we wanted to figure out how smart a group of students were, we would have questions that most people got right, questions that a few people got right, and some questions that most people got wrong. The questions that people got wrong provide more precise information about their abilities.
In the same way, including songs that some people don't like allows us to develop a more precise assessment of their music preferences. In fact, for the music test to be accurate, you have to dislike a lot (maybe half or more) of the music. What you dislike is just as diagnostic for us as what you do like.
Unfortunately, like all sites we’re restricted by licensing issues. We have rights to play some songs in full and some for 30 seconds but for others all we can do is provide links for purchase. There are, however, a number of the songs that you can download for free!
Partnering
Yes and yes. We’re working with different partner sites (content sites and social networks) to embed our interactive applications within their content. All the discovery and social functionality on our site can easily become part of your site. If you have a site that you’d like to increase traffic for or add social interactivity to, we’d be pleased to talk about how we can work together.
Tech Stuff
The usual suspects:
Mozilla Firefox 2.0+
Apple Safari 3.0+
Internet Explorer 7.0+ (limited functionality with IE 6 – time to upgrade!)
Javascript and cookies must be enabled.
In addition, Adobe Flash 9.0 or higher is required to view all results and take the Music Patterns survey with the in-page music player.
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