Tag Archives: twitter reply sniffer

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Yahoo Pipes: Major Upgrade to the Twitter Reply Sniffer

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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:

  1. Go to the Twitter Reply Sniffer
  2. Enter your Twitter username and click “run pipe”
  3. 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:

Please let me know if you see any issues or bugs by leaving me a comment on this post.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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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: