
Show HN: Who's Hiring? (postings mined from Twitter) - robinwarren
http://www.jobstractor.com/new
======
tednaleid
Looks like a good start to something potentially very useful.

Some suggestions:

I'd like to see how old a tweet is. I don't have any idea how fresh some of
this information is (without clicking on the user and searching through their
history).

Related to that, I'd also like a link to the original tweet, so that I can
potentially follow any conversation on that tweet.

It'd also be nice if any hyperlinks in the tweets were active links, rather
than just text that I need to cut/paste.

Something that's potentially a little harder would be to let the user
determine the radius that they want to see tweets for. I'm in Minneapolis, and
I'm seeing some tweets for Iowa and Wisconsin. Those could be useful to me,
but I'd more likely want to filter those to a smaller radius.

~~~
rmason
Definitely need to show how old the tweet is in days. Every job I clicked on
was expired.

I do feel that you have built something quite useful.

~~~
robinwarren
organising them by date, ie Today/Yesterday/Later is high on my list. I
figured it would be important for people coming back to the site after an
initial visit. But for that I'd need people making an initial visit first
hence I thought I'd wait until I'd got some positive feedback before doing
that.

Nothing on there should be more than 6 days old which was a guess by me as to
how much history made sense to show. Possibly that needs to be more recent
even, or maybe ordering by date will just make it less of a surprise when you
find one which is gone already.

Thanks.

~~~
chc
Something's borked with your date filtering, because I saw at least one tweet
from Oct. 1.

~~~
robinwarren
Thanks, I'll check that out. I've only been running it for a couple of weeks
and have been actively developing it during that time so have possibly broken
something and missed deleting some tweets at some point.

------
phillmv
This is crazy good!

A common complaint is that it's hard to find out about new openings because
they're often pushed through your social networks.

Directly mining the social networks is a great man-I-should've-thought-about-
that idea. I'm infinitely likelier to tweet about a job opening than to post
it somewhere.

~~~
Periodic
And as someone who might be hunting for a job, I hate having to comb through
twitter and the thousands of daily posts to make sure I don't miss a job
opening. I stopped following twitter because it was so hard to find the few
things I was interested in from all the noise. Sites like this make me believe
twitter is still valuable.

------
robinwarren
Hi HN. I'd really like to get anyones feedback on this. It's still a little
rough around the edges but my main question would be

Is this useful? Or could it be with a tweak or two?

Thanks, Robin

~~~
akmiller
Also, per the twitter developer guidelines, you need to parse the tweets and
make all links, hash tags, and usernames hyperlinks back to twitter for those
individual items.

I recently had to do a similar thing for a site I threw together to get my
sporting news in one location (<http://sportszealots.com>). It's very hacky
code written very quickly (in ruby), but if you'd like it send me an email and
I'll send you back what I have.

 __EDIT: Well damn, I didn't know about the handy utility mentioned
below...that's definitely better solution!

~~~
bjacobso
They offer a ruby version as well: <https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-
rb>

------
artursapek
Nice idea, and works well. The first tweet is a RT from a fellow student at
RISD who I didn't even know had a Twitter. Some feedback:

The second tweet that comes up for me (Providence, RI) is one labeled "North
America and Europe." I think local listings should be prioritized over broad
ones.

Filters based on language/expertise. I see a lot of these tweets go into
specifics already so this could probably be implemented easily.

As someone else mentioned, a link to the tweet would be good, and preservation
of the hyperlinks in them so I can click directly on someone's job listing
etc.

Perhaps you could also normalize the format of the locations, and group them
under one heading. For example, most of the listings for Providence are
Boston, and it's a list that looks like, "Boston", "Boston, MA", "Boston",
"Boston", "Boston, MA", etc. A consistent format would be good for readability
and having a new <h2> for each tweet is redundant.

Basically, you have a good crawler (I assume you're using one) and now you
need to alter the design of your page to make it easy to explore.

~~~
robinwarren
Thanks, yep a lot of what is required is a better way of presenting and
filterring the tweets. Working out the locations for the tweets could
definately be improved, especially when it's quite vague.

thanks again.

~~~
artursapek
No problem. Mind if I ask what you're using to track my location so
discreetly? Chrome never asked me for permission. :P I'm also building a
location-based webapp and would like to check it out.

~~~
robinwarren
I'm using this from google <http://code.google.com/apis/loader/>

Code runs in the browser then:

if (google.loader.ClientLocation != null) { loc =
google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city; lat =
google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude lng =
google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude }

hope that helps.

~~~
artursapek
Thanks!

------
StyleOwner
Have you considered doing a similar one to help companies find good candidates
to hire?

(forgive the mention of this fact but:)

StyleOwner (SF) is hiring (today we're at the UC Berkeley Startup Fair) and
we'll be at the Github party on Monday. email matt@styleowner.com for more
details. Hiring for both frontend and backend positions. Ideal candidate will
want to do 20% time toward open source work.

~~~
robinwarren
Hi there. And good luck with the recruitment.

I'd consider something like this, but I'm not sure how it'd work. Would you
just loook for people saying 'I'm looking for a job' or would it be something
more complex based on what expertise you can infer from there tweets?

Thanks for the feedback.

------
slindstr
Cool idea! I'll be sure to bookmark it...

Here's my $0.02:

\- Typo in the about page : "As weel..."

\- I'd change the 1st 2 paragraphs in the about section to "Jobs Tractor looks
for people trying to hire developers on Twitter, but filters out tweets that
are from recruitment agencies or jobs boards."

\- Love the map view

\- Does the search field allow you to filter by location, keyword, or both?

\- Group by location maybe?

\- I'd take the word "jobs" out of the logo - to me it looks cluttered

\- Do you save the posts or is it just what the Twitter search API pulls up?
Jobs might not get tweeted about more than once, so a posting could still be
legitimate after a week or so

~~~
robinwarren
DOH! proof reading fail. Thanks.

re the search field. It's just to change locaiton at the moment.

re saving the posts, I'm saving them but only for 6 days at the moment to keep
the data pretty fresh.

Thanks for the feedback.

------
yariang
I like this. As someone said, normalizing locations like the 3 variations of
Boston would be a plus.

Also, The locations could be refined. I see a lot of them being listed under
the header "Boston" when they really happen "King of Prussia, PA", Burlington
MA, or "West Newburry, MA". Those locations are not Boston. They're close, but
not quite (and in the case of the PA one not even close). There's some value
to the grouping things under Boston but I would prefer granularity in location
headers.

Definitely see this as being very helpful though.

------
TheTarquin
It looks like you have some room to refine your searching / filtering. I'm in
the Seattle area and it's picking up some noticeable noise.

e.g.:

"Tacoma cannery property to be repositioned: Pinnacle Foods Group is looking
for a real estate developer who can ... <http://t.co/UobgHb39>

and

"Online entrepreneur pitches for funding for app ... - TasteBand.com: An world
wide web entrepreneur is looking t... <http://t.co/JKAnZdBk>

~~~
robinwarren
Thanks, I definately need to get better at filtering out the noise. I may just
open it up to let people flag the noise themselves but hopefully I can improve
the automated filtering to a point it's 'good enough'.

------
neovive
Very nice. Have you considered grouping the related locations instead of
listing all the locations? For example, group "Greater NYC Area", "NYC", "New
York, NY" under one section with a consistent name. Over time you could
locally map the most commonly used location names under one heading. Also, I
would prefer to see the actual tweet text a bit larger with a smaller font
size for the location headings.

------
Jayasimhan
This is a neat tool. Great idea. One suggestion is that, do no default to
Grand Havens.

Suggestions 1\. People who dont look at the search bar at the top would have
no idea a. why there isn't any job postings for their location b. How to
search for jobs in a specific location.

2\. Could be a good idea to get the browser location and search for that, to
make the site instantly relevant.

------
mmahemoff
I found the "Londinium, London, UK" funny. It came from the londinum.com
website, but is also a place in the sense that it's London's original name. So
technically, it places the job in Roman London, which is the main
banking/business district today (aka The City) and therefore a major IT area.

------
sainib
Its a great idea and a useful app. I liked it. Looks like you have already
included quite a few ideas from here but you should continue improving it to
include different variations in verbiage and also to look for special
conditions like telecommuting etc .. Good Luck

------
m0tive
It would be great if the site url updated when I change location, then I could
bookmark a link to the location I'm interested in!

Also, after changing location, nothing seems to happen for a couple of
seconds. Some visual feedback that it's loading the location info would be
nice.

~~~
robinwarren
Good idea, that'd definately be handy. I'll add it to the list. Thanks.

------
tibbon
I'm finding that in the latest Chrome beta (unsure on other browsers) that the
map functionality isn't that great. Moving outside the initial zoom area
requires a re-search to pull up new results, and I can't seem to click on
results either.

------
rjd
I see a lot of ideas come through through here and very few of them either put
a smile on my face or have me thinking I'm going to use that, or it at least
needs book marking.

Congrats I smiled, bookmarked, and did a search. I think you're onto a winner
:)

------
dav01
Nice one, except ours don't show up. But for all you coders/synth-nerds want a
great job! Check this out: <http://twitter.com/#!/jugendingenieur>

~~~
robinwarren
Thanks. I'm going to try and expand the number of jobs I can find in future.

Best of luck with the recruitment for those jobs.

------
miles_matthias
This rocks. I've been looking for a better way of job hunting in specific
areas. Are you planning on a mobile friendly version in the future? I would
love to help! miles.matthias at gmail :)

------
drewolbrich
I tried entering "Mountain View, CA" into the text field in the upper left,
and hit Enter, and nothing happened. I tried this in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

Seems broken to me. Am I doing it wrong?

~~~
robinwarren
ah, apparently it's currently broken if you load jobstractor.com instead of
www.jobstractor.com which might be the problem. The other is there's no
feedback whilst it's loading so possibly it was just running slow. Otherwise I
guess my geo lookup could have just failed silently...

Thanks for letting me know. There's some improvements to be made as to how it
fails wrt this.

~~~
drewolbrich
You're right. That was the problem. I was visiting jobstractor.com, which does
not work correctly.

------
latch
Looks great, only suggestion so far is to:

hyperlink any links in the tweets.

------
akitto
Nice fresh interface, I like what it has to offer as a starting point this
could be massive. It looks like it will evolve into something very special.

~~~
robinwarren
thankyou :)

------
TheTarquin
Awesome work!

Do you have plans to expand the data source beyond Twitter? Maybe with filters
for users to select source(s)?

------
p_monk
When I view the listings on the map, the markers need to display an infowindow
when clicked.

~~~
robinwarren
Hi there,

The map is pretty minimal/useless at the moment. There's a lot I can do to
improve it.

Thanks

~~~
wetbrain
Something simple, but really useful for the map would be to select different
areas/location with a marker. Returning to the list view would show the jobs
for that area.

The map would be for location search, the list for details. It'd be cool if
you could filter the list view. Of course, it'd be great if you didn't have to
switch modes from list to map.

Even how it is right now, this is pretty awesome. I'm looking for jobs and I
plan to use this alot.

------
robjohnson
The simplest ideas are the ones that are commonly the most useful. Very
interesting tool!

------
mendicant
First off, I love the idea.

Secondly, I can't sign up for the weekly email. It says: Cannot POST /new

~~~
robinwarren
This should be fixed now. I broke it when I submitted to HN as I had to change
the URL (I submitted jobstractor earlier in the year when it was a something a
bit different)

------
reneherse
Cool beans. Can you expand it to have an option for designer jobs?

~~~
davers
Yeah! Or maybe, once you get the initial tweaks here worked out, tech jobs in
general — with either categories or tags to filter to what's relevant for an
individual user. Would be absolutely thrilled to see this expand into general
jobs eventually..

~~~
robinwarren
This is a good idea. I just wanted to start with something simple and small
enough to prove the concept. From there I'm sure there's plenty of other jobs
on twitter I could be pulling in.

Thanks.

------
davers
What about job listings that allow telecommuting?

------
rorrr
I think it's much more important to highlight the technologies and the
position itself than the location.

