Yesterday Yahoo! announced that it reached an agreement with Twitter to incorporate the twitter feed into its properties in a variety of ways, including surfacing tweets related to particular topics, return  more tweets in search results, and allow users to read their tweets and tweet directly from their Yahoo! pages. The move is interesting more as another vote for the importance of Twitter as a communication channel than in the value it introduces into people’s interactions with Yahoo!

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Last week Jeremy and I attended the SSM2010 workshop held in conjunction with WSDM2010. In addition to chairing one of the panels, I got an opportunity to demonstrate an interface that I built to browse Twitter search results, to which Daniel alluded in his summary of the workshop. The system is described in a position paper (co-authored with Miles Efron) that has been accepted to the Microblogging workshop held in conjunction with CHI 2010.

The idea behind this interface is that Twitter displays its search results only by date, thereby making it difficult to understand anything about the result set other than what the last few tweets were. But tweets are structurally rich, including such metadata as the identity of the tweeter, possible threaded conversation, mentioned documents, etc. The system we built is an attempt to explore the possibilities of how to bring HCIR techniques to this task.

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Twitter recently released some of its tweet-related code as open source. This is great news for those building applications on top of twitter, as it reduces the need to write the same code over and over. The released code  includes parser and HTML markup generator classes, and a Regex class that includes a bunch of Pattern instances. Code is available in Java and Ruby.

The examples seem straightforward to use, which means I will be using them!

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I’ve been messing with the Twitter search API, and I am here to whine about it. Overall, it’s a great feature, but it’s interesting that it imposes costs on the third-party client that the Twitter interface seemingly doesn’t share. For example, I can run a search and get back a bunch of results. When I do it from the Twitter web page, it gives me the option of drilling down and showing conversations when they come up in search results.

When I execute the same query using the API, however, there is no indication that a particular message was related to some other message in any way. Sure, I know who sent what to whom, but that’s not enough! Not only does the search API not tell me when a message is a reply, it doesn’t provide useful information to indicate a retweet, either.

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For a while now, Google has been serving up tweets related to searches as part of its real-time search effort. Now they are making it possible to search the Twitter stream in exactly the way Twitter doesn’t allow — that is, to search for tweets older than a few days. A query like

cyberwarfare site:twitter.com

will return a bunch of tweets, formatted as Google search results. As of the time I ran this query, it identified 1,380 hits from Twitter. Twitter’s search yielded about 250 tweets, going back to no more than 10 days ago. So far, so good.

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The recent earthquake in Haiti has attracted attention from Twitter users and researchers. Twitter has been used to collect donations, to contact people on the ground, to coordinate relief efforts, etc. Recently, U. Colorado’s EPIC Group proposed a hash-tag-based syntax on top of Twitter messages to help automate the parsing of actionable messages, and to do so effectively and reliably. This is a noble effort, but as Manas Tungare points out, the proposed syntax is too complex for its intended users, who have more pressing issues than dealing with hash tags.

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Some time this summer Twitter announced its RT (retweet) API, a structured way of expressing the forwarding (often with comments) of others tweets that has, until now, been expressed informally by prepending the letters RT to another person’s tweet. The practice of retweeting (described in a forth-coming paper by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan) has evolved several conventions for crediting the source and incorporating comments. In addition to forwarding and commenting on the message, it can also serve as a useful mechanism to introduce people to others worth following.

The new API formalizes this notion, but also subverts established practice.

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I’ve been going through some of the analytic Twitter tools/sites listed in oneforty. It’s a mixed bag, as should be expected, with some nice tools. In this post, I’ll talk about TweetReach, TweetStats, and Twitoaster; the rest will have to wait.

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Preservation is a branch of library science dedicated to the maintenance of physical artifacts. Digital preservation, its modern offspring, concerns itself with the preservation of digital artifacts such as documents, movies, audio recordings, etc. But the challenges of digital preservation are complicated by interactivity characteristic of many digital artifacts. It’s not enough to save the bits, if the goal is to understand the experience of using something in its original form. I have in mind such things as interactive fiction, video and computer games, and other similar artifacts.

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I get a fair bit of spam. Every day I delete about 400 messages that my spam filter catches; this blog has amassed over 7,000 spam comments in six months or so; and now, Twitter is getting spammy too. I’ve noticed a rash of twitter-spam-bot followers recently, and am quite confused as to what they are trying to achieve.

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