answerly

Awesome! Congratulations Denis & Arend!

>"Admittedly, I was being a bit of a dick by adding the "wtf" at the end..."

This may explain, at least in part, the nature of the response that the OP received.

The NYT example is a bad one because any commercial use of of the API is forbidden per the Terms of Use [1]. It seems like the API would be a pretty bad starting point if you were a business that wanted a relationship with the NYT.

[1] e. YOU SHALL NOT: (i) use the NYT APIs for any commercial purpose or in any product or service that competes with products or services offered by NYT. (from: http://developer.nytimes.com/Api_terms_of_use)

>If a company is going to do advertising - they should do it well.

You seem convinced that this ad being targeted to you was some massive failure of Twitter's ad product. I am not sure that is the case.

Premium Twitter advertisers (of which the Sun is surely one) have a variety of targeting options that could explain why you saw this ad.

The Sun may have simply targeted all accounts in the UK. Or, they may have targeted accounts that follow other UK publication accounts (it looks like you follow a few Guardian accounts for example).

It is clear that you didn't want to be targeted by The Sun, but that doesn't mean that The Sun didn't want to target you.

Sounds awesome! Please feel free to email anytime, would love to explore the use case further.

Awesome! Congratulations John, Brandon & Heff!

What do you mean by "not the 'ideal' candidate"? Is your concern that you aren't a hacker? There are plenty non-technical YC founders (I'm one).

Assuming you are building a startup in the music space, it would seem your experience/skills could be an asset.

Many thanks, Jay!

Thanks! The current product is definitely focused on B2B companies. We have some ideas on how to be helpful for B2C lead qualification, but that probably won't happen anytime soon since there is a lot to do on the B2B front.

>I don't remember seeing any job for non-engineers.

There are certainly fewer non-technical positions posted, but there are some. For example, ZeroCater has posted customer support and sales openings.

>>I am wondering what the view of the community is here...

The community submits and votes on the stories.

We only include accounts that Tweet primarily (really exclusively for practical purposes) in English. So it may be that there are more English language accounts in the UK that are fans of that team than in Germany. Just a guess. I think the various data normalization and other enhancements discussed throughout this thread would also help.

Thanks for the great suggestions. All are features that we'll add in the future. The goal was really to get something out there that had a small bit of utility and spend more time on it if people found the visualization interesting. As I mentioned a few threads up, this is something that our outgoing summer intern worked on during his last few days with us and we wanted to release it before he headed back to school.

No- it's not just keyword mentions. Our main product analyzes the both the content of an individuals Tweets and social factors to make decisions about what they know. I'd be happy to share more about how we do that- shoot me a note at [email protected] if you want to chat.