Taylor,
I'm about to vent. Sorry about this.
At some point did you plan on addressing any of the numerous
complaints raised against making this anything other than opt-in?
Several of us raised this, and you offered no response for 10 days.
See http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/
browse_thread/thread/983086ae9935d50c/d4a8e0fbc0fee5c0?
lnk=gstq=popular+search#d4a8e0fbc0fee5c0
When you *did* post, you didn't actually address any concerns, or say
hey, I spoke with the API team. This is why it's going like this.
Like, say, an advocate of 3rd party developers would do.
I'm not doing Twitter any favors; I realize that. I'm just the
developer of a tiny, old open source client whose been hacking away on
the API since spring of 2007. I'm not a strategic partner, and I don't
bring Twitter any value. No VC funding will be coming my way, I'm
afraid, and it doesn't make headlines on TechCrunch when I add a new
feature (ping.fm? I supported that in 2007).
But what I would like is to be treated with some respect. If you post
something, and get significant pushback, I'd expect at *very* least
some explanation about why doing it the way you guys want to do it is
a great idea. If you are an advocate for 3rd party developers, as I
interpreted your title, then doing us the courtesy of not simply
ignoring/avoiding the concerns we voice seems like part of your job.
It seems like you're doing a lot of selling of changes to *us*. That's
not an advocate -- that's an evangelist. If your role there is an
evangelist, then fine. You're doing a good job of ignoring the tougher
questions and sticking to company lines.
The point here is that I used to cut the API crew a lot of slack
because I thought they at least weren't feeding us a line. I felt they
actually were aiming for transparency, but were just overworked.
If this is the way things are gonna go with someone who is,
presumably, tasked with being *our* advocate, I think Twitter is
losing the thread. Maybe it doesn't matter for you guys financially,
and you'll go on and do Very Important Things and lots of people will
continue to view Twitter as Game-Changing Technology, but it sure is a
bummer for me.
--
Ed Finkler
http://funkatron.com
@funkatron
AIM: funka7ron / ICQ: 3922133 / XMPP:funkat...@gmail.com
On Apr 1, 8:53 pm, Taylor Singletary taylorsinglet...@twitter.com
wrote:
Hi Folks,
As indicated a few weeks ago, we're launching our new *beta* enhancements to
search.twitter.com and the Search API today -- it's currently rolling out to
our servers. Thank you all for your feedback.
*Key API Takeaways*:
- During the current phase, receiving popular tweets in your API search
results is *OPT-IN*. You will not see the new top results in search unless
you specify the *result_typ**e* parameter on your search query string.
- The result_type parameter takes one of three values:
* *mixed* - receive both popular tweets and most recent tweets for the
query. This is the equivalent of the future default behavior.
* *popular* - receive only popular tweets for the query.
* *recent* - receive only recent results for the query. This is the
equivalent of the behavior you've come to expect until present
- Each tweet in a search result will now contain a metadata node, with a
field called 'result_type' that indicates whether the tweet is popular or
recent. In the future, there may be other result_types. The metadata node
will eventually contain other fields as well.
- In addition to result_type, the metadata node may also include a
'recent_retweets' field indicating the number of retweets the tweet has
received recently, rounded to a reasonable integer.
- This metadata field will now appear in search results regardless of your
OPT-IN status on the popular tweets feature. You don't have to do anything
to receive this new metadata along with tweets in search results. In JSON,
the metadata field is simply metadata. In XML, you'll see it expressed as
twitter:metadata.
*Continued Discussion*:
To date, Twitter's real-time search has proven to be incredibly valuable.
People, businesses and organizations have come to depend on finding out
what's being discussed about a particular topic *right now*.
We've been really impressed at the integrations many of you have developed
using the Search API. Whether it's offering search columns in a Twitter
client, mapping #hashtags to search, or deep analysis of trends and brand
monitoring, you've shown us what's possible with Twitter search.
With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable
by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering
recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the
author's profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted,
favorited, replied, and more. It's an evolving algorithm that we'll be
iterating on tuning until practically the end of time.
With this
