OUseful Info

Pivotal Moments... (pivotwitter?!)

Just walking the dog after a dog of a meeting, and I think I glimpsed how another couple of jigsaw pieces fit together...

Sometimes people twitter a link; and their tweet is a bit like comment around that URL...

So, how about a pivotal service (cf. pivot searching - geddit? ;-) that extracts a list of links from a twitter feed (for example) and for each link provides a list of commentaries on that link, and maybe a list of other people who have rated that link, as evidenced by how that link has been bookmarked on delicious...

(We do track people bookmarking the OU I guess, and in particular people bookmarking particular courses on the Courses and Quals site, and try to find ways of exploiting that info I assume? Thought not... ;-) I guess for anyone new to all this delicious'n'twitter stuff, delicious is one of the best known online social bookmarking sites, and twitter is evil. Here's how it works: Common Craft: Social Bookmarking in Plain English; and, err, just be careful: Common Craft: Twitter in Plain English.)

So here's some background: delicious url history pages. As to how to do the pivot thing (that is, looking up a link on delicious that appeared in a twitter feed...), here's part of it...

First of all, look at the URL of an example page (e.g. http://del.icio.us/url/125097ca345e365126fc00264bde59d3, note that the RSS feed to that page is http://del.icio.us/rss/url/125097ca345e365126fc00264bde59d3, realise that the list of numbers is a particular encoding of the URL (an MD5 hash), find a Yahoo pipe that takes a URL and gives the MD5 hash of it (e.g. MD5 hash pipe), steal the important bit (a call to http://www.hashserver.com/ that returns an MD5 hash of your URL):

Take that MD5 hash of the URL, build a delicious history feed URL from it, and grab the feed:

Here's the pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/deliurl

It has the added useful side effect of giving you a good guess at the title of the page too... I suppose you could build a list of 'suggested' titles, and pick the one that is used the most as the title of the page linked to? (It seems somehow wasteful calling a whole page just to read the contents of its <title> element?)

It should be easy enough to build an iPod Touch page, e.g. reusing iTwitterous like stuff, that will then give a list of other people's 'comments' from delicious on each URL that appears in a twitter feed, based on whether they have filled a description in for the bookmark; pretty much for free, you also have a list of some of the people who have bookmarked it, and a list of the tags they have used...

(From the delicious user names, I guess you could have a guess at some friendfeed usernames, and if you strike lucky, maybe confirm the person on delicious is the person you guessed at on friendfeed; from this, you may be able get their twitter ID too... (or you could just guess it...).)

Confused? You should be - but it's all easy enough to do.... building the iPod Touch page is left as an exercise for the reader... heh heh ;-)

PS ok, I know, lots of twitter urls are TinyURLs... but the TinyURL preview page provides a way round that maybe?

Here's a possible Pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/tinyurlpreview

Or something like that anyway...

[UPDATE: I made up a mashup of the two pipes to create a new one that takes a TinyURL and looks up the delicious history of the full URL the TinyURL points to: The delicious history of a TinyURL]

PPS I guess a service to auto bookmark any URLs you twitter, using the tweet as a bookmark description, could be sensible; which is exactly what something like this appears to do: http://alexgirard.com/twitt/ (hmm, the page won't load for me any more after to trying to download the code? Anyway, what it appeared to do was watch your twitter feed and send any links you twittered to delicious:-(

Tags: pivotwitter, yahoo pipes, tiinyurl

Posted by ajh59 at April 9, 2008 07:05 PM