

Show HN - A tweetmeme of its own for every city - gayakwad
http://frrole.com

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Samuel_Michon
20 cities is hardly "every city". I tried 'frrole.com/mycity', expecting a
page to be generated on the fly, but no such luck. Should be possible though,
and then you could legitimately state that you offer results for every city.

It would also be a nice touch to use geolocation to automagically generate a
city (or region) page. Right now, it presented me with the page for Mumbai,
while I'm in Europe. Out of the available options on the site, London is
closest to me.

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kalkat
Agree, should have said "Building a tweetmeme of its own for every city". This
is the first release, we are taking the no. of cities to 50+ with the next
release in 6-8 weeks.

The focus till now has been on building algorithms that are kickass enough to
filter junk out and keep only useful stuff in. Still WIP I know, but what do
you think about that. Take <http://frrole.com/san+francisco> for example.

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southern
The suggestion is that the user should be able to enter any city, not just use
the preset ones.

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kalkat
Thanks, that is how it is intended to be in the longer term. But going to hit
Twitter's rate limits very soon and access to full firehose is way too costly
for a bootstrapped startup.

Hope to scale to 50+ cities by ourselves, validate traction with users from
those 50 cities and then look at really big scaling, if it is getting some
love:)

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zeratul
There is a value in providing a "social news paper for a city" but that's not
what OP is doing now. "Swarm" intelligence is superior to an individual.
Filtering news articles by number of re-tweets sets higher threshold for
signal-to-noise ratio, however, 140 characters hardly constitute a "news
article". Below, my suggestion for a data mining web application that is
focused on delivering a news paper customized for a city with high signal-to-
noise ratio news articles.

Input: X = country, Y = city, tweets from twitter

For each X scan last N million tweets that have a link to a web-site, output M
most linked domains (Facebook.com, techcrunch.com, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc) -
this gives you a base for news feeds customized for every country

For each Y in X, scan last n thousand tweets that have a link to a web-page,
output m most linked web-pages that are hosted on M domains for Y country -
this gives you the "social news paper for Y city in X country"

Parameters M and N prevent spamming and shape long term trends. Parameters n
and m give you short term trends, which in essence are the "swarm"
intelligence about which articles are worth reading for a given city in a
given country. The value here is a time saver of what is worth reading to keep
up with your community.

Note to self: could be a data mining web app

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kalkat
I agree some and disagree some. Regarding M and N, I don't think they can
control spam any more than m and n, given that M and N are going to be super-
sets of root domains of m MULTIPLIEDBY Y{1 to j} and no of tweets of n
MULTIPLIEDBY Y{1 to j} respectively, where j is the no of Y in each X.

Where I totally agree is the "Swarm" intelligence is superior to an individual
philosophy. The same thing is dictating our thought process as well. Here:
<http://frrole.com/about-us>

Where I again think differently is the 140 chars vs. the linked article line
of thought. Grant that maybe we should call this "social headlines for your
city" instead of "social newspaper..." ( 140 chars make for perfectly good
headlines) but I believe that the information overload today is increasing
drastically, attention span therefore (and otherwise) is decreasing
significantly; so much so that more content, specially textual, is not the
answer. Less content in fact is the answer, but chosen intelligently enough so
that it does not leave things out.

Where I definitely agree with gayakwad is that these are fantastic inputs, the
kind of inputs one definitely expects on HN. See from your profile that your
areas of interest too are those that we are working on (Frrole is a lot, LOT
more than no of retweets btw), maybe we should talk offline?

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pflats
This is interesting, but looking at the NYC one, your "Xpert Tweeters" really
distort the idea of "local".

I'm seeing tons of national news from the WSJ, the NBA, and a score of other
media outlets that are based in New York but not covering New York (aside from
incidentals, e.g., that Wall Street is a street in Manhattan).

Also, as you expand, it might be worth while to drill down NYC by borough.
Having a Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and even Hoboken NJ page would probably
be worthwhile both for your users, and for you.

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kalkat
Yup, have heard that one a couple of times already, we are going to take care
of that one VERY soon. Plan to aggregate tweets at country/global level too
going forward, so have to do it in a way that we remove them from the city but
not lose them totally.

Check out some of the deals, events etc, though. Good "democratized" info (I
hope:)), including things that would never make it through standard
aggregators.

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harprit
looks great.. way to go.. ranking tweets based on re-tweets is the best way to
filter out twitter noise.. a suggestion would be to keep it local to begin
with.. india specific.. else it'll again somewhat become noise at
international level..

I created something on same lines but much much smaller (and minimal) :
www.lessvu.com

primarily to track certain active communities in india.. (presently works for
journalists only)

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kalkat
thanks. Retweets is just one rule. Pretty much like google uses back links as
an indicator, but has 200-300 other rules, we use retweets as an indicator but
have 100+ rules probably. or around. These rules are spread across metadata
analysis (language based, response type, location based filtering etc),
statistical analysis(no of retweets, recency based scoring etc) and
linguistic/textual analysis (syntactical construction, use of spammy words,
characters etc)

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raxitsheth
Please expand to multiple cities, more content and Mobile. As it is first
version, Still looking good.

Best wish

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richabhi
Looks awesome !, really interesting data in my city Bangalore Are you ppl
looking only at no of Retweets ?

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gayakwad
Good to know that you liked it, Certainly we consider tweet count but that's
not the only thing, we have put lots of logic for analyzing tweet's nature
(textual/NLP), relevance (by city and category) and most importantly we have
worked on cutting noise.

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philgo20
Vancouver before Montreal? Does not make any sense :-)

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kalkat
Montreal is up in the next release.

