Checking Out of Checking In

Checking Out: Check-in applications have a long ways to go before they’re mainstream. A recent study about consumers’ use of mobile commerce tools commissioned by clothing company Liz Claiborne found that the majority of participants were enthusiastic about using certain mobile apps, like mobile coupons and product search, but not about social location apps. Out of seven mobile actions that consumers expected to use more in the future, check-in apps came in last. Foursquare is aware that it needs to make checking in valuable if it wants to remain appealing to users and has recently signed partnerships with daily deals sites like LivingSocial and Groupon. That’s the big test if they’re going to break through to the regular people. GigaOm

Twitter Traits: You’d be surprised how much you can actually tell from someone’s tweets. According to a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation, “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” you can tell someone’s gender from their tweets. Here is one particularly entertaining dataset they found regarding gender-skewed words:

Other unsurprising demographic predictors they found were that tweets containing exclamation points, emoticons, abbreviations (like OMG), repeated letters (“nooooo”), and expressions of affection (“xoxo”) were likely from a female author. Fast Company