Search Extended beyond Twitter and identi.ca

A while back, we added identi.ca messages or "dents" to our search index. It was and still is accessible at a second search page(tweetscan.com/identica). Since then, we've received requests that it be integrated to search both Twitter and identi.ca in one search result.

We've taken this idea a step further by integrating not just these two major Microblogging sites but also eight other Laconica based sites. These sites are in no particular order: bleeper.de, army.twit.tv, lareta.net, linuxoutlaws.net, sufficetosay.frontrowcrew.com, micro.ciarang.com, fun.ohhh.no, and pawwer.com. None of these gets the volume approaching Twitter at the moment but we think it's a great thing for the microblogging space to have them somehow unified in search.

For the moment, RSS doesn't do all these sites but you can do Twitter and identi.ca by visiting the API page to read about that. Also, if you know of another major site we should be indexing, feel free to comment or message @tweetscan or @weex.

Thanks,

David Sterry
http://tweetscan.com

2008 Debate #1 Twitter Statistics

The first Presidential debate of the 2008 Election started about 3 hours ago and since that time, we've captured 142,002 messages by 50,792 users from Twitter's public message stream. We present here the number of times some words of interest were mentioned during that time. For reference, the word "debate" was counted 12,460 times.



If you have any questions, feel free to add a comment. To follow future debates in real-time, bookmark this link.

Download Your Twitter Message Archive

We are very excited about a new product we released. You can now download your Twitter message archive consisting of any messages we've captured from our starting date of December 1st, 2007 to today. Just go to https://www.tweetscan.com/data.php to order. You can choose to download your messages alone or to include your replies as well. Only public messages we've previously captured are included in the database, though we believe it is the most comprehensive outside of Twitter itself.

We appreciate any suggestions you have to improve the service. Please email them to datasupport@tweetscan.com. If you are the first to come up with a suggestion and we choose to implement it, we will provide you with a complementary message archive with replies.

Thanks,

David Sterry
TweetScan.com

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.