Tag Archives: justin kistner

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Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer: More Improvements

The switch last week from TerraMinds (the service appears to be dead) to TweetScan for the Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer had a couple of unintended side effects. For people with twitter account names that are also common words, the new sniffer delivered way too many false positives. I realized that TweetScan completely ignored the “@” sign, which I didn’t think was a big deal at the time. With a Twitter account like @geekygirldawn, I didn’t notice any issues; however @verso noticed. I was also having a hard time pulling the date out of the TweetScan RSS feed last week for some reason. It was obvious today, which means that they added the date to their feed, or I completely missed it last week when I was tweaking the pipe. Either are good possibilities, since I made the tweaks to the pipe in about 5 minutes while talking to a couple of Legion of Tech board members and waiting for the board meeting to start.

This new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer explicitly includes only references to your twitter account name that are preceded by the “@” sign. For any of you who liked seeing every reference to your twitter account name, you can easily clone the pipe and remove the filter for @accountname.

I’ve also added a time stamp to the end of every title so that you can easily see exactly when each person replied. If you don’t like the time stamp, you can also clone the pipe and remove the loop right before the pipe output module.

Thanks to Ms. Fishbones for suggesting the improvements and for pointing out the typo in my blog post about the new version of the reply sniffer from last week!

I also wanted to thank Justin Kistner at Metafluence for creating the first rev of this pipe. He came up with the idea to do this and found the services that made it possible. I cloned his original version and have been making minor tweaks along the way that seem to have taken on a life of their own as things like this frequently do.

Here is the new version of the Twitter Reply Sniffer. I think that your rss reader should automagically pick up the changes if you were already using the old Twitter Reply Sniffer.

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    Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS

    Justin put together a really cool Yahoo Pipe, Twitter Reply Sniffer, to track twitter replies today using TerraMinds. You can read all of the details on his Metafluence blog.

    I will admit to being a complete Yahoo Pipes addict, and I couldn’t just be content to use his pipe without hacking on it and tweaking it a little bit 🙂

    I added a date / time stamp to the end of the title so you can also see when the reply was sent. I also filtered for duplicates. Honestly, I wouldn’t expect them, but Twitter can be flaky sometimes, so I wanted to be sure. Feel free to take a look at my tweaked pipe.

    Question for my readers: For some reason, Yahoo Pipes strips out the leading 0 in the y:published time fields. 0:2 is displayed instead of 00:02. Anyone know how to easily add the leading 0 back in on single digit numbers? I know that I could use pubDate, but it’s too long and the format isn’t very nice.

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