OUseful Info

iTwitterous Rationale - and Reimagining as iCoShare

[Provenance: the first part of this post arose out of a conversation with Alan and Martin.... and a warning by the way - this is a long post...]

Chatting with a couple of people about iTwitterous, my iPod Touch representation of serendipitwitterou, and it seems no-one gets it...

As Alan put it, "I had a particular problem with serendipitwitterous. It always looked good and I'd start using it with great anticipation, then it would take me somewhere, I'd look around, say 'What did I come in here for?', and get frustrated with it. ... Twitter is about communication and not about content/resources, and I think that's where [serendipiTwitterous/iTwitterous] so far have hit the wall - they lead to static resources rather than conversations."

So... first point: iTwitterous and serendipiTwitterous are riffs on the idea of feed annotation streams. They use a crude content analysis technique (the Yahoo term extraaction service) to identify terms that can be used as search terms or search keys etc. to find other resources... which as Alan points out is maybe not the point...

...but then, Google built a business on it...? ;-)

To reiterate the surface idea behind serendipitwitterous: a tweet is 140 characters or so on a theme; content analysis tries to identify the topic; a search on content analysis terms finds resources to annotate the orginal thread. That is, it tries to find things that might add to, enrich or supplement a conversation.

So I look at my twitter feed, or somone elese's twitter feed, and a list of possible related resources are presented to me, a bit like having an automatic Google jockey for my twitter conversations sat at my side...

Now here's part of the problem, and something Alan hinted at: is the twitter stream useful because of engagament with people chatting (i.e do we find a sense of community, and involvement in water cooler conversation, by following peoples' tweets), or are we in part using it to serendipitously try and discover things of interest to us by eavesdropping on thoughts spoken out loud, pretending people are talking to us and using that to justify why we might think what they've said aloud is relevant to us?

Here's where iTwitterous starts to have an idenityt of its own compared to serendipitwitterous. Rather than providing a view of a river of tweets from the people I follow on Twitter, explores different ways of presenting tweets and the germs of ideas contained withing them.

iTwitterous was the first step on what I'm now thinking of as iCoShare (more of which later...)

The basis of iTwitterous was this - the twitterstream from people I follow serendipitously turns up stuff that may be of interest to me; what other ways can I find of surfacing interesting stuff serendipitously, using the twitter stream as a starting point?

And this is what the different iTwitterous menu options start to explore, and why it's not hahlo (it was never intended to be a Twittter client; I don't want to know your Twitter password, so you can't tweet from iTwitterous; iTwitterous is a browsing service, that's all...)

So for example, there is the normal river of tweets view (the most recent tweets from people I follow, in reverse chrnologicial order).

You also get a view ordered by content analysis serendiTerms which may hint at things your're interested in (because it's a distillation of of tweets from the people you share interests with have twittered, right?) and from those terms a list of resources discovered through searching on those terms.

This view can actually grab your attention in way that looking at a list of complete tweets in the normal reverse chronological can't do, by misapprehending something (which is what lies behind a lot of serendipitous discoveries, I think?)

Like last night, browsing the iTerms view, I saw this:

Uh, oh... has the funding crisis finally hit?

Apparently not - here's what the search turned up:

(Note that the iTerm search view is now headed by the original tweet that sourced the iTerm. Clicking througn on the twitterer's name link takes you to an iTwitterous view of their twitterstream.)

Thank goodness for that - it's just Martin (who turns out to be a film buff) watching some film or other... Hmm, there's a trailer for it - which I duly watched (and wouldn't have just from reading his tweet). [The iPod Touch takes you to a 'full screen' landscape view of a video when you originally click through a Youtube link.]

Back to the iTwitterous main menu. The Following view (originally called Recent Friends) shows you who's been twittering lately - so this is like looking over the unread blog posts by feed/blog in a feed reader right? You can look at the whole river of blog posts (tweets) view or you can be more selective and read by blog (recent friends). It's another way of ordering, or segmenting, the view over the whole twitterstream:

(It's worth noting here that the Following view is actually a view ofver people you follow who have twittered recently rather than a view over all the people you follow, some of whom may not have twittered for some time... So the listing is current.)

Originally, iTwitterous let you add one or more hashtags to the URL and it would then give you the chance to browse a list of tweets containing those hashtags, as discovered by the Twemes search engine.

I revised the code so that now it will also extract any hashtags contained in the current twitterstream, and let you browse over all tweets that contain these tags, again courtesy of Twemes.

That is, iTwitterous will now display a #tag menu option if any hashtags are found in the list of most recent tweets you've created or are following as well as any tags you've explicitly referred to in the URL :

So now, from the front page menu, I can go straight to the #tags menu option and see a summary view of what hashtags the people I follow have recently used (if there aren't any, the menu option does not appear), rather than scanning the full twitter feed.

So for example, last night, here's what the people I follow had recently hashtagged:

Clicking through on a tag takes you to a list of recent tweets containg that tag from Twemes:

It's worth mentioning here that I took the decision at this point to not display as the first item the tweet(s) responsible for the hashtag being displayed in the #tags list. Instead, iTwitterous just displays the most recent tweets (courtesy of twemes) containing that hashtag.

If the tweme/hashtag is popular at the moment, then it's possible that the tweet that caused the tag to be listed by iTwitterous won't make it into this hashtag listing (for example, if it wasn't twittered recently enough). If I don't recognise who twittered the hashtag from the feed, or they don't appear anyway, then to see the actual tweet in which the hashtags originally appeared I need to look at the list of tweets, or maybe guess at the person responsible via the Following list.

(Hmm - I guess I could flag any hashtags used next to the people who used them, and similalry, flag the twitter ids of the people who used the hashtag in the hashtag menu?)

With the automated hashtag discovery view, iTwitterous really diverges from the notion that I'm looking at the tweets from people I follow, to one where I'm following an idea, as manifest by a particular hashtag and as suggested by someone I follow twittering about that subject.

What iTwitterous encourages you to do, then, is drop the idea of using it to look at a twitterfeed... Instead, you are using it to view a serendipistream...;-)

If you click on the link for a hashtag, it takes you to an iTwitterous page for that hashtag.

I still don't expect you to get it though, so I spent an hour or so this morning adding another menu option to the list - delicious:

What the delicious iCoShare routine does is take the top level username or hashtag and use it to guess at a delicious username, or act as a delicious tag (as appropriate), and then pull in either the most recent links tagged that way or the most recent links from the delicious user's network.

(Of course, the tag could also be used as flickr or Youtube tag, too.)

The URL history link points to the history page for that URL on delicious - that is, the list of people who have bookmarked that link and how they described it.

If you browse the delicious network links for a user, then the link results listing also includes the name of the person who bookmarked the link. Rather than pointing to their delicious account, iCoShare guesses that the delicious username is also a valid twitter username (hopefully relating to the same person!) and links it back through to the iCoShare page for that user.

(Note that I took the decision not to list the user's own bookmarks... because this app is all about serendipitous social dicsovery, right?;-) Howver, I maybe need to add a link to other peoples (guessed at) delicious links?

What the heck - it's only 3 or 4 lines of code:

Clicking the /whoever/ on delicious will take you to their delicious page...

So that's it, iTwitterous starts to morph into iCoShare...

And another change of URL, I'm afraid... iCoShare http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ico.php

The next step is to work on the social life of URLs a bit more, and allow iCoShare to work with URLs as well as usernames and tags... I'm thinking this will be based around the use of the delicious history page... but I need to walk the dog to ponder that through...

Tags: icoshare, serendipitwitterous, itwitterous, delicious, twitter

Posted by ajh59 at April 11, 2008 12:10 PM