matsu

Filtering @ replies from your Twitter feed

Twitter is simultaneously a “micro-blogging” platform and IRC 2.0 (as many people have dubbed it), meaning that it sometimes becomes a giant chat channel.  Many people (like I do) use what they write on Twitter to enhance their own blogs, or feed it (along with other sources) to services like Friendfeed.

The problem with this is that the ratio between your “original” content and replies to other Twitter users becomes very low, and these so called “@ replies” have little value for people that aren’t in on the conversation.

Continuing my love affair with Yahoo Pipes, I’ve created a really simple pipe that will fetch your non-protected Twitter feed, and filter out all the @ replies. It will also remove the “nickname: ” prefix from the start of each tweet.  Just input your twitter username on the form, run the pipe, and choose the “Get as RSS” from under “More options”, inside the “Use this Pipe” section. Feel free to clone it and improve it.

Tweeting Google Reader notes

I wanted to have a way for my Google Reader notes to be “automagically” tweeted, but not the regular shares (so I don’t flood my Twitter stream).  I don’t know if there are already other solutions for this, I made this essentially to learn a bit more about Yahoo Pipes.  It also uses twitterfeed, a very nice service which fetches a RSS stream and tweets a small blurb plus a shortened link for each item from that stream .

You’ll need:

• The URL of your Google Reader public page, it should look something like this:

  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09549915423433150590

• Your exact author name from your Google Account page, mine is “Pedro Pinheiro”
• The Yahoo Pipe I created to filter the shares without notes, and input the previous two bits of information on the form.  Feel free to clone it into your own Pipes space and edit it/re-distribute it.
• To click on the “Get as RSS” under the “More options” button inside the “Use this pipe” box, note the URL
• To create a feed on twitterfeed – it uses OpenID, but you need to supply your Twitter username and password (yes, I know this isn’t safe, but as far as I know, Twitter doesn’t provide a safer alternative yet).

That’s it! Once the feed is activated on twitterfeed, within the specified time-interval, your Google Reader notes will automatically show up on your Twitter stream.

Filtering #Anita

Some people have been complaining about the insane amount #Anita exposure on Twitter, so I designed a Yahoo Pipe to filter out any tweets which have the word “Anita” in them. Enjoy!

In the flesh

My online life started about 18 years ago with the BBSs, Fidonet, Relaynet, etc.  In 1994 I got my first “true” connection to the Internet.  Contrary to non-geek belief, this “staring at the monitor for hours on end” has not alienated me from the world, quite the opposite.  I’ve met a whole lot of interesting people, some of which have become my friends, some even In Real Life.  People I wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for the Internet and all the interesting services that run over it, like Twitter for instance.  I’ve written about Twitter before, and now I’m organizing a monthly Twitter meeting in Lisbon, so you can meet your fellow Twitterers in the so called Big R!!

Interesting Twitter Apps

Four new applications that use the enormous amount of information that can be found on twitter.com have come to my attention this week.

The first two are the brainchildren of my friend Luis Figueiredo (T/B), Alpha Twitter and TwitSpam.  The first shows which individual URLs have been shared by the greatest number of users, a good way to check what is hot right now online.  The second does the reverse, showing the top single URLs “shared” by a single user spammer. Although you can always choose not to follow anyone, it’s a good way to see who is trying to use twitter as a “spamming” platform.

The two other applications are Tweet Clouds and TweetStats.  The first generates on the fly a word “cloud” based on the frequency certain words are used on a certain user’s (public) twitter timeline.  TweetStats collects a certain user’s twitter timeline on the fly to generate statistics of when, how, and to whom we tweet.

With twitter being the most used “micro blogging” platform, all these applications give different insights on the community and individual users and how they use the system.  If you don’t know what twitter is, click here.