Quotably: The Perfect Tool To Make Sense Of Twitter

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1. Aidan Henry
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 pm

   It was only a matter of time before something like this came along. Why didn’t Twitter do it first? It seems like the obvious next step in the evolution.

   Cheers,
   Aidan
   http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

2. 113.com
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 pm

   Nice simple interface… or mightbe too simple?…

   Enter a Twitter username:
   [entered a twitter username]
   Sorry, it appears this person has not recently participated in any discussions on Twitter.

   what constitute a discussion on Twitter?

3. Ely
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm

   this was the fastest picked up unknown-startup launch story of web2.0. I do not use Twitter, but now i can see myself using it daily to stay updated and find what people think of a particular subject using Quotably.

4. Dalai Lama
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:55 pm

   Have been waiting for this tool, been using tweetscan for similar but this looks much better.

5. kopi
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm

   so I made comment again… using another email and name… does it work? if it does not, then crap I read.

6. Jesus H Christ
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 9:59 pm

   This is really easy project to do using the twitter API. i would expect 5 clones by Monday night. but i still think it’s neat.

7. Maheswaran
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 10:01 pm

   Excellent!
   And yeah there are lots of such features to be incorporated into Twitter. The founders seem to be struggling with ever growing user base!
   As a matter of fact, third party applications for Twitter are getting popular and some have started to earn (like Twitterific) while Twitter has sill not earned a dime..
   By the way, I am interested in your fight over openID

8. Michael Arrington
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm

   Dalai - nice name. Tweetscan is still a primary search tool for twitter, of course. But this is awesome because it organizes everything.

9. Mick Liubinskas
   

   March 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 pm

   It doesn’t always work. It assumes that a reply is to the last message sent.

   Does work out better than nothing though.

   What I want is a desktop app which ignores everything after the first reply so that if people get into a one-on-one I can turn the volume down.

10. Mick Liubinskas
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 10:07 pm

    Skitch showing conversations not relating to each other;

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/a.....1/sizes/o/

11. Michael Arrington
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm

    yes, it’s having some problems with grouping. I just started four different conversations on twitter to see how it handles it - spam, google, hackingnews, quotably. i also jumped into a separate iphone conversation. So far, it’s getting about half of it right, which isn’t too bad.

    http://twitter.com/techcrunch

12. Darren Woodley
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 10:19 pm

    The responses aren’t grouped differently. They appear that way because Twitter itself assigns an @ response to the recipient’s last post.

13. John McCrea
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    Seems pretty raw at the moment.

    That said, I’m a big fan of folks who are adding value around Twitter.

    Heck, I’m even becoming a FriendFeed fan!

14. Ben Tucker
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    Hey, thanks for the post, Mike. There are now permalinks (good idea!). The threading is certainly not optimal, but for now it’s based on the same heuristic twitter uses: assume a message with @username is responding to the last message of that user. Of course this certainly breaks down sometimes. I may look into being a bit smarter about it.

    Thanks!
    Ben

15. sawyer
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 11:11 pm

    “You can also view a RSS feed for any Twitter user by simply adding “.rss” to the end of the Quotably URL”

    it does work in the techcrunch case, but for this one “http://quotably.com/SlimbodyStanley.rss”, it doesn’t work. A few minutes ago “http://quotably.com/mashable.rss” doesn’t work too, but now it recovers.
    Maybe quotably is not stable yet.

16. Everett
    

    March 23rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm

    Really neat Ben!

17. Michael Arrington
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 12:01 am

    Ben - wow, you don’t mess around, nice addition on the permanent links.

18. shafqat
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 12:37 am

    1) The quick iteration and development between Ben/Mike is impressive. Exemplifies the spirit of the times, especially for all cynics!

    2) Hacker News is where its at. I think it just shows that ’social news’ is still alive and well. It’s the community that matters, and they have it. More than the link free-for-all, its the question/feedback model that really makes that site interesting to peruse.

19. Scabr
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 1:12 am

    Great service.Waiting advansed twitter search…

20. Jim
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 1:28 am

    Another excellent tool release this weekend - http://shorttext.com/twitzer.aspx

    Lets you post and read more than 140 characters on Twitter. Good reviews here -

    http://www.labnol.org/internet.....tter/2665/

    http://www.winandmac.com/tips/.....ete-story/

21. Michael B
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 2:55 am

    Great addition to twitter.

    -Michael B owner of http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com (ways to make money online)

22. Stefan Constantinescu
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 3:02 am

    ::slaps forehead really really hard::

    when friend feed came out people went nuts, yet Jaiku has been doing the exact same thing since it came out

    now quotably is getting all the attention and people are going nuts over it, yet Jaiku has been doing the exact same thing since, you’ve guessed it, the day it came out

    what other jaiku features are going to be cloned and adopted into the twitter ecosystem? how about seeing where your friends are at any given moment?

    wait a minute, yahoo is trying to do that with fire eagle.

23. massiah
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 3:09 am

    so what is stopping Twitter from adding this feature thereby making Quotely redundant?

24. Mark Evans
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 3:11 am

    The HackerNews secret is out. Damn!

25. Whitney Hess
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 4:01 am

    Michael, like others have noted, when I have multiple @reply conversations simultaneously, the threading breaks. I’m guessing it’s because Quotably is based on timestamp and not actually content or any other logic.

    It might be worthwhile to isolate a series of @replies between two people and thread those outside of any other conversations. Might fix the problem.

    In any case, thanks very much for the link.

26. Sonny Gill
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 4:43 am

    Pretty cool - works decent so far, hoping that twitter eventually adds this to their next steps of growth.

27. Kanwal
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 5:53 am

    Now all it needs is a widget!

28. Who is Billy Bragg?
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 5:55 am

    How long before Twitter just adds this as a feature?

29. Serrin
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:19 am

    No, Twitter is NOT about adding features…

30. Matthew
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:25 am

    Please stop linking Hacker News! Thanks.

    Not sure why you have an agenda of ruining it for everyone.

31. Whitney Hess
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:40 am

    What’s the deal? How often does this get updated? It’s been 2 hours since I wrote some tweets and still not seeing them on Quotably

32. Ontario Emperor
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:49 am

    I wouldn’t call it “perfect.” Quotably has to guess when it’s figuring out what the true thread is, and sometimes it guesses wrong. But I’m not sure if any program could construct a 100% accurate depiction of threads. And when Quotably is right, it’s very good.

33. David
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:54 am

    not exactly perfect, but i nice little hack. it has to guess at what replies are, so it’s wrong for me at least half the time, showing me “conversations” which have nothing to do with each other. it can never really work for this reason. still interesting to play with though.

34. 606shel
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am

    is there a list out there somewhere of all the interesting people posting to twitter (social media focus)?

35. Ed
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 9:08 am

    @Steffan - I have to agree with you. Can somebody please explain why this service is such a big deal? Jaiku has had threaded conversations…since the beginning. Add to that the fact that some people are rapidfire tweeters and move on to another conversation, and even threads in twitter are only so good…

36. jason l baptiste
    

    March 24th, 2008 at 6:14 pm

    awesome service. nice, im in the screenshot giving openid shit.

    -jlb

37. Eric Gagne
    

    March 25th, 2008 at 7:46 am

    That could become an interesting tool for a reporter. But I still prefer Tweetscan which is more like a search engine for Twitter. You enter a keyword and Tweetscan shows you all the posts containing this word.