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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.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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    FriendFeed Becomes Useful by Adding Search

    I really wanted FriendFeed to be useful for me; however, I was having a hard time really finding much use for it … until they added a search feature. Until now, I found that my FriendFeed content was completely useless due to being overwhelmed by Twitter, which has orders of magnitude more traffic than any other service. I tried tracking my friends using RSS, but almost everything was Twitter, and since I follow most of them on Twitter already, almost all of the content was duplicated.

    With the addition of search, I can see myself using it to quickly find friends who have expertise or who are at least talking about a topic. For example, a quick search on “OAuth” tells me that Chris Messina and David Recordon are talking about it the most (big surprise), and a search for “startupalooza” shows me some interesting bookmarks and discussions about the upcoming event. This is a great way to quickly find friends with knowledge about a topic along with their bookmarks, Twitter thoughts, and blog posts. Very cool addition to the service IMHO.

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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    Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS Part Deux

    A while back, I modified Justin’s Twitter Reply Sniffer to add a little more functionality. The reply sniffer is really useful to help find Twitter @ replies directed toward you from everyone (whether you follow them or not). This is incredibly helpful for me in a couple of ways. First, it finds replies that I missed from people I follow. Second, I just can’t keep up with the noise if I follow everyone who follows me; however, I think that the conversations are one of the most important aspects of Twitter, and the reply sniffer helps me participate in those conversations.

    My issue with the original reply sniffer is that it was based on TerraMinds.com, which was down all day yesterday, so I decided to modify it to use a similar service, TweetScan. Here is the link to the new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer pipe.

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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    Twitter and sxsw

    Yes, I was at sxsw last week as you know from the obnoxious and constant tweets about how awesome it was. I also heard a few people talking about how tired they were of hearing about sxsw.

    On an unrelated topic, I was playing werewolf with the from the guys at Toonlet last night, and I thought it would be cool to play around with it over lunch today. I came up with this quick sxsw / Twitter comic:

    Twitter at sxsw by geekygirldawn


    Girl - normal: HOW WAS YOUR WEEK? Bow - normal: I WAS AT SXSW. YOU KNOW,

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    Portable Social Networks session at sxsw

    Here are my relatively raw notes from the session with David Recordon, Chris Messina, and others.

    People are tired of re-creating our data and friend lists on every new sites. We need to make it easier to move content from one site to another. Every website starts from scratch instead of building on things you have already created. This is why Facebook apps have been so successful – you can use the apps with your existing friends and existing information.

    You don’t necessarily want all of the same friends on every service, and you don’t want to impose your new apps / sites on all of your friends by flooding them with friend requests. You may also want to message people on other services and integrate with various services so that you can use the sites you like, your friends use the ones they like, and both can still communicate and share information between them.

    Who owns your friends email addresses? Do you have a right to port your friends email addresses from Facebook to Plaxo? You want to be able to contact your friends and easily find their email addresses without violating the privacy of your friends.

    Terminology is getting confusing for people. Social networking, social graph, etc. The web is way more than terminology, it is really about the people and the experiences. Should we be using the terminology “friends”? Are these people your “friends”, are they contacts, etc.? There are many more interesting ways to frame it around actions (Dopplr with fellow travelers).

    Contacts can be imported by giving them your email address and *password*. Do you really want to do this? Does it set users up to be phished?

    Google released an address book api that can be used to get your contacts without giving away your email address and password.

    Building blocks exist today to build portable social networks:

    • hCard can be used to import contact information from other public services into another service. The point is to make it like magic: let them know what it does, what information would be shared, and how it will be used without necessarily confusing normal users with the terminology (leave it as a link or on an about page). Focus on explaining what you are doing for the user and not necessarily how you are going to do it. Also need to give people the option to only pull in certain contacts – just the ones that you want on a particular service.
    • Need better ways to validate which accounts belong to a friend by following a trail of links. Is the David Recordon on Twitter the same one as the one on Facebook. Once you can specify your accounts and your friends accounts, you can also focus on using the same methods to bring in additional content and information. You are already creating the information, but adding some additional annotation around it makes it easier to find and make the data portable. Google social graph api is one way to do this – all based on public data.
    • Enabling trust on the web with OpenID – you already have these accounts on the web, and OpenID is a good method of verifying your identity. You can use it to log in now and say who you are. If you have other profile information in your hCard, then the other site can discover it. But maybe you only want to share certain information.
    • OAuth is more about authorization than authentication. Authorizing access to your resources using tokens to sign messages, like what you do with Flickr uploader by going to the Flickr site to log in and give the uploader authorization to access your photos. OAuth is really important for giving control to certain websites without giving them access to your username and password, which on Google would give them access Google Checkout in addition to mail / contacts. You can also revoke the tokens and not have to change your password to revoke access. A lot of the big players are moving in this direction.

    These ideas are a big part of the evolution of the web. It will be difficult, but it’s a bit of tough love in the meantime.

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    Social Strategies for Revolutionaries Session at sxsw

    Social Strategies for Revolutionaries was Charlene Li’s presentation to a full audience in one of the big rooms at sxsw. She will also be posting the slides on SlideShare after the presentation, so this post just covers a few of her key highlights.

    There have been a few social revolutionaries driving campaigns like reviving Jericho with peanut shipments. This is a groundswell, a social trend where people get information from each other (also the name of her upcoming book).

    Four-step approach to groundswell:

    • People – assess customers social activities.
    • Objectives – what are you trying to accomplish
    • Strategy – Plan for how you will get there
    • Technology – decide which technologies to use after you figure out the above 3 points

    Age is a major driver of participation. Participation in social networks tends to drop off as you look at older populations, since much of the content isn’t geared to older people on social networks, but this is gradually changing.

    Blendtec has increased sales dramatically from the viral nature of the “will it blend” videos on YouTube. Ernst & Young is successfully using Facebook to recruit college students, not by using it as a marketing tool, but by having conversations with students and answering questions at the executive level. She also used Josh Bancroft as an example of someone who made something happen inside a big company using social software (wiki) to create Intelpedia under the radar of the executives (bonus points for a little Portland geek cred) 🙂

    Find and support your revolutionaries within your organization, and let those people use their passion to make the company better, but this involves education for executives to help them understand what is happening and why. You also need to make it safer to fail for the people who are driving these initiatives. It also helps to start small, but think big and iterate to make corrections and adjustments as you figure out what works and what doesn’t. The social strategy also needs to be the responsibility of every employee and not just one person or group. These transitions and cultural changes take time. It can’t happen overnight and requires a great deal of patience.

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    BarCampAustin and BarCampPortland Compare & Contrast

    This is my second BarCampAustin, and it’s been interesting to notice some of the similarities and differences between Austin and BarCampPortland. For some reason, Austin seems to have more presentations and pitches instead of the informal round table discussions that people seem to favor at BarCampPortland; however, Austin also has more of a party atmosphere. Last year, it was held in a bar with lots of drinks all day, and this year, they had beer on tap all afternoon. They also had a live band, karaoke, and stage diving. Austin throws parties; Portland plays werewolf 🙂

    Both BarCamps tend to be full of really smart people with great questions and great conversations both in the sessions and in the hallways. I’ve been running into and meeting people that I only get to see in person at conferences like these. It seems like a lot of my techie friends seem to favor BarCamps, which isn’t surprising since many of them are fellow community managers and community-minded geeks.

    On a final note, it wouldn’t be a whurley organized event without something over the top & crazy happening. BarCampAustin had a runaway battlebot that jumped the curb in the parking lot and attacked the air conditioner at a neighboring house. Final score: battlebot 1; AC unit 0.

    barcamp austin

    Community Reputation Systems Session at BarCampAustin3

    A lot of people are anti-reputation system taking the position that since they might be gamed, they can’t be useful. Personally, I don’t agree with this approach. I think you have to be careful with reputations, but they can be useful.

    Basing it on activity alone can be a good way to build the community, but eventually you need to base the reputation only on helpful or productive participation, not just everything. Cubeless uses a karma system with a heavy weight on whether answers are helpful or not, and they have separate numbers for activity and helpfulness; however, they plan to combine them into one number. They also plan to hide the number in the future and only show categories that are based on the hidden number. I think this helps, but it also helps to make the content very transparent, so that you can see the types of contributions. If you can see the people who have a lot of activity of the “good post” or “nice job” can probably be easily ignored while focusing on contributions from people who have helpful and interesting feedback.

    We do something similar in the Clearspace reputation system with a combination of activity and helpful points.  I also like the idea of hiding the overall number. We currently show the number, and it makes it easier to game and compete for points.

    When does activity become less important to weight the currently activity more heavily than past activity so that people who leave don’t stay at the top. The really need to gradually drop off as newer contributors become more important.

    Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.