http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/fked-company-and-adbrite-founder-launches-twitter-dating-site-flirt140/
flirt140 - Yet another twitter app :-(
one line caught the attention though
"Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate"
Any idea how they are determining the gender?
http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html
See this paper:
http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final....
Sidenote: this was an epic win for me in Gender Studies class, when I said that not only was the professor's claim that the genders communicate "essentially identically but with some individual variation" wrong, but I would constructively demonstrate it by blind-assigning a stack of any papers she cared to give me. (I also gave her a copy of the above paper, which she read with interest.) The class then retreated from the scary notion of binary decisions on the basis of the scientific method to the more comfortable one of endless arguing whether the differences were socially constructed or biological.