
YCRFS 3: Things Built on Twitter - pg
http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html
======
GavinB
The beauty of twitter isn't that you send messages without specifying
recipients. Any billboard does this. HTML webpages, blogs with RSS feeds, etc
do this.

Twitter allows you to:

1\. Communicate on equal footing. You're living on someone else's blog, or
their social news site, or their subreddit, or their messageboard, or in their
chat room. There's no need to shout anyone down with negative karma, because
everyone controls their own feed.

2\. Control your world. If you stop following someone, they basically cease to
exist. On the other hand, they can follow you if they want, with no harm to
you. This allows celebrities to share directly in a way they never have
before.

3\. Stay engaged with minimal time. Tweets are limited to 140 characters for
everyone. Writing a blog post requires a commitment and willpower. A tweet is
extremely easy.

Despite all of this, Twitter itself is very awkward to use, and making sense
of the un-threaded mass is very difficult. It's reaching mass adoption because
it can be all things to all people (microblog, chat, rss feed, friend updates,
broadcast announcements, etc).

There are better ways out there to facilitate good discussions. Google is
trying to tackle the office collaboration problem with Wave, and I think
there's huge progress to be made in the space of online discussions, separate
from the current plethora of news reaction sites ( _coughhackernewscough_ )
that we have now. The inevitable rise of self-posts on news sites (it's
usually resisted or frowned on at first) shows the existence of this need.

~~~
coliveira
I agree that the great advantage of twitter compared to other social tools is
that you don't need both parties consent for it to work. Anyone if free to
listen to you without requiring your consent.

It is more like in real life, where I don't need to ask your permission to
listen to what you say.

------
tlrobinson
This isn't really related to the RFS, but the idea of Twitter as a new
protocol sort of scares me. Most of the successful internet/web protocols so
far have not been controlled by a single company, but if Twitter can sustain
their current growth there's no reason for them to open up the "protocol".

~~~
borism
Well, SSH was controlled by a single company at first...

But maybe calling Twitter a "internet protocol" is a bit of a stretch, even in
purely technological terms? Human communication protocol, maybe...

just to paraphrase Stephen Colbert: "The protocol we didn't know we needed
until we had it"?

~~~
nostrademons
A lot of Twitter traffic is machines now. Actually, this is making it a little
hard for humans, since there are so many spammers/pornbots.

And there're are a bunch of examples of protocols that were initially
controlled by single companies. AIM gave us Oscar and TOC. Microsoft gave us
SMB. Kazaa gave us FastTrack.

~~~
coliveira
The difference however is that SMB, for example, was implemented by Microsoft
but can run on any machine. Twitter is tied to twitter machines.

------
shaddi
I think "messages without a recipient" have been around for quite a while, and
we call them broadcast messages. DHCP does this. Radio does this. Blogs do
this. I'm not saying that Twitter doesn't have an interesting innovation here
(I personally think they do), but I don't think they've "discovered a new
protocol". They've taken existing concepts and applied them to people.

~~~
timf
> I think "messages without a recipient" have been around for quite a while,
> and we call them broadcast messages.

Yeah or any number of pubsub, queue based messaging systems. What twitter has
is _millions of users_ all in one place with low barrier to get started and
easy access via mobile, web, and API. It has its warts, but so do many popular
things (TCP/IP for example), the thing that matters about it is that it is
deployed and used heavily and in people's consciousness.

------
djb_hackernews
I'll take this opportunity to plug my site that is built using the Twitter API
- <http://www.playtwabble.com> . Twabble is a vocabulary game based on the
words you use in your Twitter status updates. It uses a point system based on
the game Scrabble. I built it to learn Django and Python. I didn't get much
feedback when I submitted it to HN, so here goes again? Hope this isn't
spammy, I think my game illustrates a basic example of what is possible with
Twitter.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Let me also plug my site :) <http://www.celebsutra.com> It aggregates tweets
and pictures from celebrities on twitter. Had submitted it to twitter and have
implemented most of the changes people had suggested.

~~~
ericwaller
Let me do the same, <http://twitthegame.com/> It's a place to talk about
sports on twitter (like stocktwits).

------
judofyr
Should we be doing this startup the Twitter-way, or do we need a business plan
too?

~~~
pg
No business plan needed. All you need to know is roughly what you want to do.

~~~
percept
pg: Is it okay to contact you with questions? If so, where? Thanks.

~~~
pg
Sure: pg@ycombinator.com

------
cperciva
Does anyone know what the current rate of tweets per second is? This would
influence what it's possible to do with the streams.

~~~
ivankirigin
You can read every tweet from a single machine. It's just a matter of getting
acces to the steaming API.

~~~
cperciva
_You can read every tweet from a single machine._

Sure, but the rate of tweets will determine how much processing you can do per
tweet given a certain amount of computing power.

~~~
Tichy
If you manage to save them somehow (or distribute them to different machines),
you can distribute the processing, I suppose.

~~~
cperciva
Exactly -- thus the question of how many machines would be needed to perform a
certain amount of processing per tweet, which ultimately comes down to my
original question of how many tweets there are.

------
brk
This is cool.

I've been trying to figure out Twitter for the last couple of years. Left to
the defaults, using twitter.com as the "interface" it seems to be a giant
attention-whoring spew of marketeers and SEO "experts".

To me (and I think I said this a long time ago in a post here) the potential
as a global distributed message bus always seemed so much more powerful. It's
kind of like IRC to the next level.

I'm going to have to think on this. I've been toying around with some Twitter-
based thoughts relating to my home automation and video analytics hobby-
projects.

~~~
steveklabnik
The key to Twitter is to think of it as a big old stream of data.

Of course you don't want to read it all. That's why you follow people. It
pulls their information out of the stream, and makes a substream for you. The
same goes with turning on people to mobile: it pulls them out of that stream,
and into one even closer to you.

~~~
brk
I hear you, but I'm not so sure that it's just about picking people to follow.
That feels too yesterday... I'd like to pull trends out of the conversations
at large. Can Twitter be a trending engine? Can you leverage a topic for
financial gain? Is there actionable data in the random blatherings of a
million people?

If I am JetBlue (I'm not) and people are ranting or raving about some
experience on Delta, can I use that data? Run a promo? Give them a safe haven?

In one respect, Twitter seems like it can be the exposing of the raw conscious
of "the public", that group that has been so elusive to marketeers. The trick
is to extract the data, to measure the thing, without affecting that which you
are measuring. One of the longest standing challenges in science.

I'm rambling, but thinking on iterations of this in my head.

~~~
diego
If you have any suggestions to improve our tool, we'd be happy to hear them.

<http://trendistic.com/>

------
HistoryInAction
With proper filtering, a news alert system could be pretty cool coming from
the firehose. I'm thinking identifying key words like the Moldavian #pman tag
with regard to the student shutdown of the gov't following alleged voter
fraud. You'd need to establish a solid baseline for a large number of words to
discover variations from the baseline. carpdiem and I have discussed this one
for a bit, but we couldn't figure out how to finagle access to the data stream
to start developing. Could be interesting...

~~~
HelenL14
Maybe going beyond simple wordcount to determining statistical probabilities
of certain words / phrases being mentioned together & at "high" frequencies
would taper down the number of words you need a baseline for (because I also
don't assume the baseline will be static or even near stable - changing trends
of discussion topics)

This idea also ties into the "new news" idea a bit. What we've seen from
events like #iranelection is that twitter is a good (but could be great) tool
for detecting news at the onset of events (before big stations pick up on it),
but really starts to get bogged down with "spam" or RT's once a topic gets
picked up. I'd like to see news that integrates these abnormal spikes in
tweets that hint at a bigger underlying story w/some sort of follow-up with
more context about the event.

------
damonpace
Since we're talking about Twitter being a "protocol"...Is it likely they will
be the only 140 character microblogging platform? What opinions do you have on
Status.net and what they are doing with www.identi.ca? I think twitter has
created a new protocol, but not a monopoly on that protocol. In 5 years people
will be microblogging everywhere. That's what worries me about building
something off twitter.

------
rocketman
@PG If only our 'other ideas' is a response to a RFS, would you like us to
check the 'this application is a response to a RFS'?

~~~
pg
No, though if it's an alternative idea you're really serious about you could
file a second application for it under one of your cofounders' accounts.

------
thinksketch
Twitter is the “Atari Pong” of real-time messaging services?

I remember how exciting it was back in February when I started realizing what
it meant to have a real-time messaging protocol.
[http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/25/design/algorithm...](http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/25/design/algorithm-
design/from-microblog-to-network-protocol-how-twitter-will-redefine-the-
internet)

How magical! Imagine all the strange and wonderful things we could do with it
- like water our plants automatically! But I'm going to have to guess that
twitter has seen its heyday. Twitter has been fueled by the exciting idea of a
real-time protocol - and that idea will truly shape the next generation of the
internet. But that idea is here now and it's going to outgrow twitter in a
hurry. The idea of a real-time protocol is going to be the backbone of the
next internet-merged-with-mobile-cellular-satellite-and-wireless-mesh-network
revolution. Every device will talk directly to any other device. The ISPs will
be the next media giants of this year - scrambling to hold onto their market
models as the internet as we know it dissolves into the fabric of the
technological landscape powered by open source network communication software
and ad-hoc device-to-device mesh networks. Twitter has been a real
inspiration, but I just don't see them growing and adapting to be the driving
force to carry this revolution. Thanks, twitter, but I'm looking to google
wave now as a protocol that has real potential to be the backbone structure
for the next-gen internet. Or hey - prove me wrong. It definitely seems like a
good move to reach out for fresh ideas at ycombinator.

More on google wave - and annotated video clips that summarize the google wave
demo video:
[http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/06/09/web/media/google...](http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/06/09/web/media/google-
wave-coming-soon-it-will-supercharge-your-email-then-shake-the-webs-very-
foundation)

------
jurjenh
[offtopic-ish] This is the first decent short summary of twitter that I fully
get. I haven't "bought in to it" yet, due to my free time being fairly
limited, and to me it doesn't seem to add much value compared to the time I
_think_ i need to spend to get the hang of it... _maybe I'm just getting
old..._

------
benreesman
ok so here's my idea:

you take the data out of the hose and run a bunch of "machine learning" over
it to figure out what twitterverse is saying about apple. or rather, apple
stock.

if you can guess the opening direction the next day better than 50% of the
time i'd say you would have some money on your hands.

i kid, i kid...

~~~
jlees
we're actually doing something similar to this, but have been tracking a
number of stocks as well as other things.

twitter + sentiment analysis = prediction market; but in most observable
cases, we're seeing twitter lag behind the market, not actually predict it. oh
well!

~~~
paraschopra
Hey, any chance you have raw data to process? I'd like to give it a shot
(doing sentiment analysis on your data)

~~~
jlees
Our internal data is kinda one of the things we curate and I can't really give
that away, but I do have access to an academic corpus that might be
redistributable. I'll have a look. :)

------
jlees
I wonder how the rest of us mortals get firehose access. We could do some
pretty cool stuff with it, and it'd negate the need to absolutely hammer the
Search API (er.. not that we found workarounds that involve hammering the
Search API.. oh no).

~~~
apgwoz
Use what they give you for free. Impress them. Ask for better access. Profit!

------
maxklein
What twitter NEEDS is a web service that allows you separate the real humans
from the bots and not-real accounts. Various applications can then be built on
top of that information.

------
robryan
From personal experience using facebook and twitter, facebook is a much richer
source of information to be mined, to bad though that facebook is for the most
part a closed platform, at least on the level that you get with twitter being
able to analyse the stream of tweets or searching all tweets made.

Wonder if people have created facebook apps for the sole purpose of getting
access to a lot of users data then on sold that access to others? If that's
even possible.

------
CitizenKane
I'm going to be applying under this. The only problem is that I just left my
former startup about a week ago. Looking for someone who would be interested
in applying along with myself. Someone who is an awesome developer with a
strong machine/statisical learning background prefered. Please e-mail me at
kyleATcodeincarnateDOTcom.

------
fizx
Dear [deity],

Please have someone make a noise-filtering system!

~~~
jacoblyles
What would be left?

While some of the aggregate information that can be gleaned form twitter is
interesting, I have yet to see anything approaching a single meaningful
message.

I know that many people seem to like twitter, but every time I go to the
twitter website I leave without experiencing anything interesting. Maybe I'm
doing it wrong.

~~~
byoung2
_Maybe I'm doing it wrong_

I use Twitter extensively, but I can't say I've gone to the actual Twitter
website more than a dozen times. I think the most interesting uses of Twitter
involve using Twitter data in other places, like putting a stream on your
blog. I think that's where the future of Twitter is. I saw a cool
Twitter/Flickr mashup a while back that took a Twitter stream and translated
it into pictures, which was cool.

------
ntoshev
Is there a public dataset of tweets?

There was one available for download, but it seems Twitter pulled it:
[http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/12/29/massive-scrape-of-
twit...](http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/12/29/massive-scrape-of-twitters-
friend-graph/)

------
quizbiz
I think the future of twitter is in effectively tracking what genuine people
need, want, and feel and displaying that information in an accessible manner.
I have no idea how to execute that thought but it seems like the next logical
step.

~~~
dpcan
All the "genuine people" I know in my life don't use Twitter and have no
intention of doing so. Not one of them needs to tell people they don't know
how much they love apples.

<http://twitter.com/#search?q=i+love+apples>

All people will simply STOP using twitter.

I used to be on Twitter often, and so were many people in my small city. Now,
if I go back, about 2 or three people I followed post to twitter every couple
of weeks (if at all) where there used to be about 30. They all just stopped.

It's like ANY new toy. You play with it for a few weeks right after Christmas,
but then, it just ends up in the toy box and is never played with again.

~~~
coliveira
People though the same about the web in general, but things change when you
build around this infrastructure. The first time I saw the web I though nobody
would stay much time around a computer to look at crappy web sites. But the
really good web sites came in, and we are here 15 years later.

------
beza1e1
Twitter is not a protocol. This Pubsubhubbubtub-thingy is.

------
lloydarmbrust
So, who's going to make the next spymaster?

