Comments on: Sweet! Tweetscan

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:03:37 +0000

Thanks Brian for the background/history on the follower sorting. However, in making decisions to change the interface based on the antics of a minority of users (those gaming to be at the “top”), they are violating IMactHO the more important priorities of good user interface design. That should always be the highest precedent.

In fact, I found that entire iconic interface useless gunk, as well as the random order of the following list.

Thanks for the terraminds search- it is quick, and I like having RSS feeds.

Hope to cross paths some day at an AZTweetup!

By: Brian Shaler

Brian Shaler — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:21:12 +0000

Oh, I breezed past the bottom of the blog post about sorting. The list was originally sorted by display name. People would use quirky characters to cheat the system and become first on all of their followers’ friends lists (like the politicians who auto-follow back). You would see display names starting with 1-5 boxes (or question marks). The box would represent a character not found in the charset available to the browser. They were in essence entering an ASCII value (the value used to alphabetically sort) #0001.

They changed it during the summer (07) to be sorted by the users’ URLs (who knows WHY they changed it, but they did). However, Twitter allows users to change their URLs, so the same “cheaters” started using 000whatever for their URLs.

There was another change in late September, which is based on the user’s ID (you can easily check ID#’s by going to a user profile and examining the RSS link). The ID, of course, is in the order that people signed up for Twitter.

Personally, I think they should have left it alphabetical. Making it cumbersome to use is worse than letting people “cheat” to get to the top.

Oh, and another Twitter search app: http://terraminds.com/twitter/ (via Twitter user @serena)

Cheers!

By: Brian Shaler

Brian Shaler — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:27:42 +0000

I use it all the time. I have started using Tweetscan more than http://twittermap.com/search because it seems to miss fewer updates.

One thing I wish Tweetscan would do is substring comparison. On Twittermap.com/search, I can type in “shaler” and get results for “brianshaler” AND “brainshaler” (lovely mispelling) AND “shaler”

By: Educational Technology and Life » Blog Archive » links for 2007-12-29

Educational Technology and Life » Blog Archive » links for 2007-12-29 — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:23:52 +0000

[...] Sweet! Tweetscan » CogDogBlog I’ve been waiting for something like this: a real-time search engine for Twitter posts! I need to play with it to see if it will allow me to search just my own tweets, but this is very cool in any case. (tags: twitter) [...]

By: Sue Waters

Sue Waters — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:25:34 +0000

Definitely a much better feature than the tracking feature that they have added to Twitter which sends them via your IM notification system. Have just taken the RSS feed and put into Google Reader to test if it is works well.

Order in twitter appears to relate to when someone started following you. Absolutely crazy!

Another cool application which has potential is Twitter Tester. Makes adjusting your twitter followers easy.

May need to add these applications to my twitter post.

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:07:56 +0000

Because the Twitter “replies” tab is somehow broken?