trendpreneur

When I was at LeWeb back in December, I merrily tweeted away, only to see a couple of comments from my relatively intimate Twitter following that, quite frankly, I was being a boring annoyance. Sure, it was nice taking part in wider conversations using the #leweb hashtag, but for people sitting at home and not freezing to death in Paris, my babble was completely OTT. The same happens when you see people live-tweeting panels and events, it’s amazing if you’re there and following along using Twitter Search, but if you’re not then it’s spammy to the extreme.

So that’s the problem: how do I turn off discussion of an event I’m not at, without unfollowing people I like (and who might still make interesting comments outwith the hashtag)?

Filter Tweetdeck to exclude, not include

I’ve just poked around in TweetDeck a little, and the simplest thing to do is just filter your friends. You can either put the people you want to listen to in a specific group, regardless of what they’re saying, or add a filter to All Tweets to remove a keyword. Sorted.

This is a fairly quick-and-dirty (I hesitate to say inelegant, since the simplicity is elegant in and of itself) hack to blinker yourself. I don’t like it because some useful stuff will, inevitably, pop out of a widely-attended and widely-tweeted event.

Picking out the gems

Let’s use that wonderful wisdom of crowds again, and use a couple of measures to filter tweets from an event (let’s use the highly topical #sxsw), here presented in terrible pseudo-rule format:

• tweet default SHOW
• If (tweet contains #sxsw) default IGNORE
• If (tweet contains #sxsw) AND (tweet contains http://) default SHOW
• If (tweet contains #sxsw) AND (tweet contains RT) default SHOW
• If (tweet contains #sxsw) AND (tweet sentiment = very positive) default SHOW
• If (tweet contains #sxsw) AND (tweet sentiment = very negative) default SHOW

More sophistication:

• foreach (tweet contains http://) IN (tweet contains #sxsw):
  url_frequency[tweet.re((http://[a-zA-Z0-9._-/]))]++
  url_frequency.trim_sparse(5) // function to ignore anything appearing less than 5 times
  print url_frequency.keys()
• foreach (tweet contains RT) IN (tweet contains #sxsw):
  RT_frequency[tweet]++
  RT_frequency.trim_sparse(5)
  print RT_frequency.keys()

Sorry, that code is pretty horrible, but I hope the meaning is clear enough! Basically, show any RT’d message or URL that is repeated more than five times overall.

Righteous justification for being absent

Not everyone’s absent from an event like SXSW by choice; some of us are limited by factors such as time, money, being on the wrong continent, etc. As such, we get happily righteous when it turns out that those at the event are having a stonkin’ miserable time (example: the recent tweets from Brits in Austin about the terrible weather. Hurrah! cry those of us at home.)

So, easy enough to do: http://wishyouwerenthere.com, a waterfall tweet display that takes a keyword and uses the magic of AJAX to show people exactly what they’re not missing by picking out all the horribly biased, negative tweets about it. Who cares about the positive when you’re not taking part? Exactly. Now to see if I can code that up tonight (feel free to beat me to it, it’s a busy weekend what with BarCampScotland tomorrow and some application deadlines looming)!

Also, finally, I promise I’ll post something that isn’t about Twitter soon. Honest.