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HN: I'll run a marathon to build whatever you decide on tweet.in

10 points by plaggypig ↗ HN
I haven't been able to come up with any strong ideas, so I'd like to give this group the opportunity. It may be a fun exercise, or a nightmare, but either way it'll be something different for a little while.

Submit your ideas and vote the best ones up to the top. Once a field of ideas has been established and I think a winner emerges I shall start a marathon session until completion.

Challenge me with wild ideas, or suggest simple tools to improve upon whatever already exists.. but whatever it is, explain why it would be valuable to you and others.

I'm open to the idea of giving the person who submits the winning idea a stake in the project, but as I'm in the UK it may be difficult to do so formally. Feel free to discuss whatever you think would be appropriate and I'll do my best to come up with something fair to reward your creativity.

Let's be tweetin!

23 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 33.4 ms ] thread
chaosprophet
You could build a twitter search app, which searches and returns real time news. It should be capable of categorizing tweets about an event as headline(MJ's dead), more info at(latimes.com), comments.

In short it should search twitter for real news and display it in a traditional blog style. Perhaps, it could even display excerpts from the info source site. The comments display should be real time so that you can in effect discuss the news with totally random people without having to follow them or anything.

A killer feature would be an up/down voting system, so that any noise in the news items gets immediately voted out. Btw killer domain name. Perhaps use "What's tweetin now?" as a tag line.

EDIT: Why it would be valuable: Ask Jeff Goldblum :P ( http://technologizer.com/2009/06/25/twitter-the-fastest-way-... )

EDIT2: You could also add a user rating system like the one at stackoverflow, in order to get the bots out and give more weightage to more popular users.

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plaggypig
Interesting idea and I can think of a novel interface for this. I upvoted you, and that's where by influence will end.. for now :)
chaosprophet
Well if you're interested in fleshing it out, I might be able to provide some help with the natural language parsing.
tlrobinson
Some sort of user quality measurement / recommendation engine thingy.

There's a lot of bullshit on Twitter these days, we need tools to sift through it to find the good stuff. Not Twitter's "Suggested Users" list, which mostly contains celebrities and companies.

There's a lot of metrics you could use:

* negative points for "follow-baiting", i.e. following hundreds or thousands of random users, hoping they'll follow you back, then unfollowing the people who don't follow you.

* number of user's Tweets favorited (normalized by number of followers?)

* average follower's rating. kind of like PageRank.

These are just a few off the top of my head.

hotpockets
There is a real need for a reliability metric. For instance, a lot people recently tweeted rumors about Jeff Goldblum dying. Penalize those people. Other people actually were debunking the rumors, reward them. It will help quality to use an NLP grammar parser I believe. Every time there are rumors/scams on twitter you have a chance to improve your metric.
chaosprophet
Problem with an NLP parser is since twitter restricts to 140 characters a lot of people don't post proper grammatically correct sentences. This makes the parser much more complex since the parser will then have to guess the intended meaning. A tweet like "Jeff Goldblum???" would be almost impossible for the parser to understand.
hotpockets
There really aren't that many ways to say "I heard Jeff goldblum just died???". You could probably make a list of like 100 different ways and get good accuracy. In fact, question marks alone are a good indication the person didn't do any private verification.
chaosprophet
If you were going to create 100 different rules for that one sentence, imagine the costs of scaling up. It simply is not viable. The only way to make this possible is to maybe train the system for a corpus consisting of about a million tweets. But the problem with that would be that those million tweets would first have to be individually tagged manually by humans.
hotpockets
But how many ways can a rumor be stated? Say the rumor is someone got married: "did so-and-so just get married???". If you make a 100 sentence structures to look for could you reuse them for multiple rumors?
chaosprophet
The problem is not how many different ways a rumor can be written, it's how many rumors can be written. Esp. considering the fact that you have websites which automate the process of rumor-manufacturing...
hotpockets
Thanks for your comments, I agree that something automated is more efficient and robust. However, I was also thinking doing something manual might be a quick way to build and launch a site, even if it has poor accuracy. If you want to discuss it further, send me an email. Its in my profile.
sqba
You could build an app that doesn't have anything to do with tweeting. But that may be too hard to come up with.
chaosprophet
Not to mention it would be an utter waste of a killer domain name.
daleharvey
tweet.in definetely sounds like you should be focusing on the publishing of tweets than the consuming.

one thing I have thought about doing with twitter is "lifestreaming" but properly, I want to mention gigs I have gone to, films I have watched, books I have read, bands i like. I may rate them, write a short review. but I would like to be able to go back over and see my history without silly searches

erikwiffin
Does Wolfram|Alpha have an API? if so, you could do a pretty cool question/answer thing.

  erikwiffin: @tweetin why is the sky blue?
  tweetin: @erikwiffin The sky's blue color is a result of the effect of Rayleigh scattering.  Shorter-wavelength blue light is... http://bit.ly/3qaEo
tweet.in could be a searchable/rankable/commentable database of all the searches that it has performed.
plaggypig
There is an API so I believe your suggestion ought to be possible. Just to play devil's advocate though; wouldn't people overestimate Wolfram's capabilities and expect the bot to be able to answer all sorts of difficult questions that it can't grok, particularly about ongoing political/cultural events which seems to be the lifeblood of Twitter, thereby making the service look kind of lame and useless..?

I'll do whatever gets the most votes but it seems this thread was forsaken. Would have been nice to see more discussion/refinery!

Arun2009
"Tweeting, inverted".

From my knowledge of twitter (have NEVER used it), it allows one person or entity to publish messages for everyone to see.

What if several people want to publish messages TO someone or some entity (like a company), and want them to be seen publicly? You create a channel for that entity on tweet.in and tweet your message into the channel. Others will be free to join in. It'll be like one of those public boards where you can leave messages on particular topics.

So, for example, you'll have messages for the Iranian leaders, condolence messages for MJ, product feedback on Vista, etc.

SwellJoe
Hashtags (#brand, #name, #topic, etc.) have become the de facto means of doing this. I'm not sure what a tool could do to make that more effective.

I think the magic of Twitter has partly been its ability to be anything people want it to be. Just like Zombo.com.

notaddicted
I heard a rumor that people use twitter like a search engine -- ask a question, get answers.

Make a bot that records such questions, and their answers, and then make a search engine over the records.

Expert Mode: discern between questions like Am I fat?? vs. What is a cheap but nice hotel in LA? -- although it maybe funny not to.

Is there some kind of tweet stream you can process for this?? It seems like it would hammer the twitter infrastructure so it may not be coool.

growt
I think the ".in" is perfect for some location specific service. You could build urls like tweet.in/London etc. There are already some services that show you twitter-users in some specific city or area, the problem is that these people do not always tweet about their city, so it's almost useless.

I once thought of a service that lets you add a location to a tweet and a short url. That service would create a map with all your tweets composed in that way.