Twitter Streaming Api and the Chatter of Life

photo via flickr by Randen Pederson, CC

I've been meaning to play with the twitter streaming api. There are so many ways to explore applications of it.

With node.js, there are a ton of available modules that make it very simple to put together an app that uses the streaming api.

So, last night and this afternoon I finally started putting together some pieces, tweaking on features of a budding app. For what I do not know - I am just seeing what might naturally arise.

The current specific pieces are:

  • twit - for handling gruntwork for dealing with both the REST and streaming twitter interfaces
  • retext-sentiment - for (trying to) detect the sentiment of text
  • say.js - for having my mac speak tweets that are flying by, randomly choosing one of the built-in voices for each tweet (tweets are spoken only if one is not currently being spoken)
  • smslingo - for converting "sms speak" to their multi-word equivalents

Sentiment Sentiments

A while back, I had looked into sentiment analysis and was a bit disappointed. I believe that this may still be true - at least for real-time. Of course, it might not matter in the large if you've got a firehose of tweets coming at you.

The Twitter Hum

Last night, I was listening to the rush of tweets about Michigan after that once-in-a-lifetime game-ending play. This afternoon, it's been the NFL. Just silly chatter, often very funny. There is something oddly soothing about the ongoing activity of life.

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