TwitLinks: Not Useful, Not A TechMeme Killer
Michael Arrington
35 comments »
It’s clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media. No one has created an application yet that harvests that information and presents it as breaking news or breaking memes with anything like what TechMeme has done for blogs and other news sites.
The newest entrant is TwitLinks, which RWW calls the TechMeme of Twitter. It sounds exciting, but the site is nothing more than a list of links provided by top Twitter users. I’m one of the users they track, so I’ve taken the opportunity to spam the site. It was way too easy, as shown in the image above.
A single user’s gesture is not enough information for a service to call it interesting. Other users have to show their agreement by talking about it or linking to it. The aggregate linking patterns presented by AlphaTwitter, for example, is way more interesting than the data presented by TwitLinks.
Other sites are trying to organize Twitter information as well, including Quotably and Tweetmeme. They don’t appear to be the answer, either. Quotably tracks usage on a per user basis. TweetMeme’s rules are more behind the scenes, but the results are less than stellar.
There’s a terrific opportunity here for someone to mine this data and become a valuable destination site. But no one has done it yet. I anxiously await its arrival.
maybe twitter should do it
But surely you could do this to techmeme too? you are a top source on there so they trust you not to spam.
I guess they could just drop people that spam it.
you could just create a crowd of people that you want to watch via http://crowdstatus.com cough cough shameless plug :p
I agree with Darren. Just be careful with your power. =)
The irony of seeing this post on twitlinks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonnyg80/2414647954/
I’d rather see this type of information coming from a weighted statistic, using Tweetburner’s URL tracker as well as the Twitter user’s ‘fame’ (measured either by followers or activity or a combination of both). And this could probably come from Twitter or Tweetburner, but I think Twitter is not looking to add too many services. They provide the base, they are the Sun… and all these little planets start forming around it, some more susceptible to life than others.
Hi Michael,
I use Tweetscan.com all the time. It’s the app we at Comcast utilize to seek out customers who have made comments with our company name in the title. When it was working, terraminds.com did the same thing. Seems to me they also had a sort of the top key words that came up on Twitter. They have been dead for some weeks. TweetClouds.com is another interesting approach. They build a cloud with the words in your posts, the more often used are bigger. Here’s yours:
http://www.tweetclouds.com/use.....runch.html
@Darren, not necessarily since Techmeme has that “special sauce” algorithm bloggers want to break!
Waiting for someone to comment on here with a response to Michael’s last statement!
True True Darren
I presume that it’s gonna be difficult to aggregate highly tweeted links and comments via twitter if the links/comments differ between true URLs’ or those of that shortened variety via snurl.com and the likes ?
A trusted source of sorts is kinda the way to go and the reason it works is because that source is trusted not too spam crud; cept on a bad day perhaps !
ttfn
Dave
Couldn’t agree more that there’s gold in that thar data… would love to see an app that combines alerts and aggregation with some kind of conversational interface, and stores/tracks topical and conversation rounds over time. Provides meta on the conversation space viewable by topics, posts, or participants. And maps that not only to influence but to expertise also.
And then somewhere down the line renders the social graph in all of its full screen resplendent and colorful glory! Facebook without the binding….
@Dave yeah totally bloggers who are not on there want to crack the code but techcrunch is a top source on there so if they write a spam article and others comment on it then it would display on there.
with a little research you can figure out techmeme but you won’t get on it unless you get linked by a source.
I guess Gabe is working on one for twitter :p
I was trying to do something like this a couple of weeks ago - filtering and aggregating tweets on the basis of how many people ’star’ them. So if 200 people star the same tweet, it’s likely to appear in the current ‘most popular’ list. Lists refreshed continually to ensure freshness, all-time top charts, archive, categorization etc etc. What you have then is a quality filter to cut through the noise.
It’s also a level playing field in the sense that a star from Mike Arrington carries no more weight than a star from, well, me or anybody else. But there is weighting of sorts, of course, because those people with the most followers are more likely to attract stars from their followers. Probably have to filter out the obvious system-gamers.
Problem was getting access to the data i.e. being able to scan everybody’s public feed continuously to pick up starred tweets. No way to do this with Twitter’s current API. Ergo, brick wall on the development front.
If anyone can help, please get in touch: kyle@scunnered.com
They’ve removed the spammy links that I put in, but it’s obvious that they did it manually. That doesn’t scale.
There something out there already that may be what you’re looking for: http://www.alphatwitter.com
Check it out
I like that Arrington is blunt. Too many tech blogs sugarcoat things.
so we now found out RWW probably got paid to write that post. even if they didn’t, they certainly cheated us! but that’s doesn’t make Michael Arrington the saint either!
Blog and blogers are killing the very thing that made them so popular among people, which used to be unbiased, raw and honest attention to their passion and people’s precious time. But now, every tech blog is fighting for a bit of extra attention, killing somebody else’s fling and expanding into different markets while killing other blogs, sounds too much like the good old corporate world.
i hope me and my own blog would never become this… disgusting!!!
@Tony - Exactly how long have you been reading this blog?
@michael - The links haven’t been removed, they are further down the page. Thanks for highlighting a problem with twitlinks which I will try and get fixed
@Bam - RWW didn’t get paid to write that post
The nice thing about Twitter Apps is the majority serve a purpose, and they are more creative&useful than 95% of Facebook applications. I still wonder why there is no Twitter Apps Fund yet
michael to remove competitions for his friends?
Is there going to be any friction with Leo over the Twit name?
Bam wrote: “so we now found out RWW probably got paid to write that post. even if they didn’t, they certainly cheated us!”
I missed the part where you explained the logic for that
Anyway I can confirm that we weren’t paid to write about it.
TechCrunch wasn’t all that valuable, or feature perfect, or well-defined in the beginning either. Truth is that heavy news consumers are migrating AWAY from the origin to the aggregators. TwitLinks is yet another with credibility behind its human filters. The question becomes, what is the credibility of the human “expert” filter posting links, which is not to say that Michael has none in his assessment (obv). However, it is to say that the mere act of spamming TwitLinks to prove that it can be done validates that it is the human filter that is the ORIGIN of any potential problem.
Can’t we stop asking technology to do EVERYTHING, and take some responsibility for our own approach, interests and behaviors in influencing how effective certain apps, and the medium overall, become in helping us to navigate the flood? TwitLinks is only as helpful as its contributors, so be helpful, please.
I’ll roll with #22 a bit - alltop (gosh — i can’t believe i’m about to say this) has already proven…..useful <gulp> to me…and just a few days ago it was the cat’s pee.
Way to go, Guy - I suck! You rule! Or the day laborers you paid to put that site together for you rule.
Watch our, haters - you’re time is coming! It buuurrrrrrns. Be careful with the hate!
That said, does this Twitterish site actually do anything? No.
TwitLinks good
twitlinks is a good start at trying to pull together a disparate and chaotic communication medium. it will mature I am sure, as the critics espouse their displeasure at how it functions - thats easy, any puppet can do that.
maybe something like dailytwitter when it finally goes into beta with go towards some of that data mining?
http://blog.dailytwitter.com/?p=41
daliytwitter…
Twitlinks for Jaiku: http://jaiklinks.com