Identi.ca Reply Sniffer

It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it 🙂

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.

I’ll try to make some improvements to it over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, feel free to leave me suggestions in the comments on this post.

Usage:

  1. Go to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe
  2. Enter your username and click “run pipe”
  3. Grab the RSS feed output

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9 thoughts on “Identi.ca Reply Sniffer”

  1. Hi Dawn,

    I’ve been playing with your Yahoo! Pipes identica reply sniffer for a couple of days. Here is what I’ve learned. In the “fetch feed” box, I had to add my own rss url – or I just received your replies, related to me (which was one). Then of course, I put my own user name in as the default (gwalter). Then it seems to work fine.

    Here is my version if you want to look at it: http://ping.fm/35IEo

    If you come up with any changes, let us know. I was looking at @metafluence’s Twitter reply sniffer – but that starts getting waaay over my head!

    Thanks gw

  2. Gary,

    You should just be able to enter your name in the username field and click run pipe. If you enter your username in the field it will autopopulate the fetch feed box with your rss URL. There really isn’t any need to hardcode it in.

    Yahoo Pipes does some strange things with caching, which can cause a delay before things get picked up by the pipe. I suspect that your copy worked because it was new (therefore, nothing was cached), not because the functionality was different.

    There could be some bugs, so I’m curious if anyone else is having the same issue as Gary (I haven’t been able to reproduce the error).

  3. Aha! It wasn’t liking the “.” in the text input name. Should work just fine now – no need to hardcode your URL into the pipe.

  4. Hey, Dawn. It doesn’t appear to be working for me yet. I got my first @ reply in identi.ca 13 hours ago, but still no results from the pipe. Identi.ca added a Replies tab last night, and I do see it there. Thanks for sharing!

  5. Troy,

    Yeah, it’s pretty buggy. It was mainly a temporary solution to catch some @replies until they implemented that feature.

    The reason it’s buggy is because it depends on RSS (there wasn’t the equivalent of Summize for Identi.ca yet). The RSS feed for all of the people that any individual follows only contains ~50 entries. If Yahoo Pipes doesn’t poll the RSS feed before the @reply scrolls out of the 50 entries, then it will miss the @reply entirely. It will miss more @replies if you are following a bunch of people, since posts will roll off more quickly.

    Honestly, I would scrap this pipe now that Identi.ca has @replies built into the site 🙂

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