Filtering Twitter Noise

The problem, and some solutions using TalkingPuffin and Scala.

Dave Briccetti@dcbriccetti

What is Twitter noise?

How can I mute everything from Foursquare?

Nothing more from Foursquare.

If we wanted, we could just exclude Foursquare tweets from individual users.

What about noisy retweeters?

No more retweets from this user. This leaves her original, primary tweets, which we value.

How does TalkingPuffin store these filters?

Let’s look at the filters dialog.

These are “compound filters.”

Contains a List of these:

Tags

Tags may be assigned to people, and tweets may be included or excluded by tags.

Tags can be exported to Twitter lists.

Here we just want to look at Twitter employees.

Tags are managed by a TagUsers object.

CompoundFilters and tags are stored in InOutFilters.

InOutFilters are stored in a FilterSet, along with some general, boolean options.

Detecting retweets with regular expressions

A shared repository of regular expressions or other filters that can be used in a community to

identify and filter out noise.

External Noise Filters

General Filters Pane

Delivered Via a Web Service on Google App Engine

Loaded into a List of regular expressions

And used to find noise tweets

Summary

● There is a lot of noise on Twitter● With the right tools you can control it● TalkingPuffin is one such tool● Scala is a great language for creating such

tools

More

● Learn more about ● TalkingPuffin at TalkingPuffin.org● Scala at scala-lang.org

● Consider joining the TalkingPuffin open source development effort

● Contact● Dave Briccetti, @dcbriccetti