trendpreneur

I’m not at LeWeb (though Steven is), but two cool things have come out of it so far today.

Firstly, firehose access — hurrah!

Secondly, Tweetminster Search (TechCrunch link) is… interesting. It’s a very hard problem to get right, measuring the sentiment of Twitter against a particular term; if the search term is “Labour”, do you search for tweets with the term “labour” in, expand the lexicon based on domain knowledge (”Government”, “Gordon Brown”), or perhaps search every tweet by a Labour MP? The methods and results seem to be in a very early stage right now, but this is something I’ve been thinking about and looking into, so cut them some slack for the rough edges. (Having said that, I will level this one criticism: as the service stands, I can’t really find anything useful out.)

Visualisation of political opinion, trend-spotting, disaster management and voting prediction are all going to become super hot over the next few months. Tweetminster Search is timely, and the mentioned API will be something definitely worth playing with; one area Tweetminster definitely adds value in is the curation of domain knowledge, i.e. maintaining a list of MPs and related Twitter accounts (news etc), and presumably caching those tweets. Firehose or no, having a readymade domain specific API is a NLP hacker’s dream. Honest.