Ubiquity for Tweet Scan

Have you heard about Ubiquity? Mozilla's new plugin for Firefox adds a command line interface to their great web browser. Since Tweet Scan provides some web services, I thought I'd try my hand at creating a command to let people execute a search. To try it out, visit http://tweetscan.com/api.php and subscribe.

After installation, restart Firefox, invoke ubiquity and start typing 'tweetscan'('twe' is all you really need to type in a default install). Now, a Firefox restart isn't supposed to be required so if anyone knows how I can remove that step, I'm all ears.

Creating the command wasn't hard. All I did was take the 'echo' example from the author tutorial, use CmdUtils.getDocumentInsecure to grab the current tab, and set the document.location to the search url after escaping the search phrase. You can take a look at the code when you subscribe or by going to http://tweetscan.com/tweetscan.js.

This is the simplest command I could think of for Tweet Scan but I'll be looking for a way to extend this to make Tweet Scan useful for email and other creative contexts.

Happy Scanning,

David Sterry

identi.ca support

Tweet Scan has recently begun tracking dents on the identi.ca network. If you've not heard of identi.ca, on the face of it it's a Twitter clone. But in actuality it is the main installation of the first major piece of Affero GPL'd software to hit the web: laconi.ca.

If you'd like to search messages on identi.ca, proceed to http://tweetscan.com/identica

At this moment, rss feeds, email alerts, and other parts of Tweet Scan are still only pointed at Twitter but we plan to grow our support for identi.ca as the platform matures.

API: JSON, RSS and Badges

What does API stand for? Does it matter? Truth is, a web service just isn't a web service without an API. Informally, anybody could use the RSS feeds we've been providing as an API but well there are easier ways. Especially when it comes to creating other web applications that process and display real-time information.

So we've created a JSON implementation. If you are not familiar with it, JSON is a format that is ready to read by Javascript. In our case, we provide that data wrapped in a call to a function called ts_parse. If you define that function to handle the data, that's a start. You can look at http://tweetscan.com/badge.js for a reference implementation. Which leads us to the badges....

The first use of the JSON and what was used for testing is also available at http://tweetscan.com/api.php in the form of a badge. You can grab a couple snippets of code, put in your search string, and wham! you'll have topical live updating tweets on your site.

Of course, we'd love to see what else can be done with this data. The possibilities are nearly endless. So if you've got a developer's itch to scratch, give it a shot and let us know if you need anything more in the API.

Happy API Scanning!

Video of Tweet Scan

Just saw this cool video today from Robert Scoble's feed on Qik. He talks about how he uses Twitter and Tweet Scan(2:22) so look, listen and learn. Robert mentions searching: Microsoft, Scobleizer, Winer, and retweet.

Search by date

"History, history is laughing at us, plotting its discovery, victory, victory, blame it on the victory." - Bad Religion

Today marks the first day where all previously collected tweets are available online. You can search back in time by clicking on the "just now" field and choosing a date from the calendar. You can also type the date in YYYY-MM-DD format if you prefer the keyboard which we often do.

Why is this useful? You might be doing a report for a client and want to judge consumer sentiment before and after launch of the new site. Or perhaps you remember a friend said something cool but it was so far back that paging through your archives is impractical. Maybe you're just a historian trying to help us all avoid repeating our mistakes.

This is a new feature and there may be bugs so please do tweet about them including the word "tweetscan" so we can log them, submit to code review, and finally to our implementation group to be rolled in with the next Tweet Scan service pack. ;)

Happy Scanning!

Redesign and Popular Searches

If you've visited the site in the last couple hours or if you helped test it yesterday, you are now seeing a redesign of the site. The previous interface was a hack, too spacious, and even we were getting tired of that green. Tweet Scan now takes up less space on the screen and uses strict(er) css for a standard layout no matter which browser you prefer.

Additionally, we wanted to put a new thingy(that's an accepted word now right?) on the page. Google has their Zeitgeist which is cool but having something that updates once a month or even once a week is glacial by Twitter standards. Our Popular Searches div updates once an hour and reflects some of the most popular searches of the last 24 hours.

Happy scanning!

The OR operator

In the quest to make our humble search engine the best it can be, we've implemented the OR operator in our search. So if you wanted to search for cats or dogs you can enter that as 'cats OR dogs'. If you want to do an OR between two exact phrases or an exact phrase and a single word, that should work too. For example 'cats OR "big dogs"' will work as you'd expect. Note that the OR must be capitalized for it to work.

This updated functionality should work in RSS, on the site, and in Twhirl. If you have any comments or suggestions, let us know at @tweetscan OR right here in a comment.

Happy scanning!