With all of the many problems Twitter has been experiencing lately, the tools that people use for Twitter have also been unreliable. The Twitter Reply Sniffer has been mostly broken for a couple of weeks due to the unreliability of Tweetscan. I spent some time playing with Summize and Twittersearch, but I found that both provided slightly different results. Both occasionally miss tweets, but they didn’t seem to be consistently missing the same tweets. I also decided that relying on a single service for this pipe was a bad idea, so I wanted to use multiple services to improve future reliability.
Today, I am releasing a major upgrade to the Twitter Reply Sniffer pipe to reduce the dependency on any single service. I have been testing it out in a copy for about a week, and I’ve been happy with the performance. If you are already using the Twitter Reply Sniffer pipe, it should just automagically start working for you in the next few hours, since I moved my changes from my copy back into the production release.
Usage:
- Go to the Twitter Reply Sniffer
- Enter your Twitter username and click “run pipe”
- Grab the RSS feed output
I want 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’s a brief history of the evolution of the Twitter Reply Sniffer Pipe:
- Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer: More Improvements additional filtering and bug fixes
- Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS Part Deux switch from terraminds to tweetscan
- Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS my original release with minor tweaks to the original Metafluence version
- Twitter reply sniffer original Metafluence version that my pipes are based on
Please let me know if you see any issues or bugs by leaving me a comment on this post.
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Dawn, this sniffer is totally awesome. I just set it up to send me SMS alerts which is something I have been dying to have. Great work!
Clay,
Let me know if the Yahoo SMS alerts work for you. I’ve turned them on a few times and found that I get a lot of duplicate messages. It was also missing quite a few messages. I think Yahoo has some work to do on their alerts.