kalkat

They haven't said why, but the reason seems commercial and not technical.

Unless a service is bringing in millions or maybe tens of millions of $$ in revenue, a big company like IBM would not find it to be attractive enough. And some big manager one day is gonna cut it down as part of 'house cleaning'.

Whereas for a smaller startup, that same 'millions of dollars' in potential revenue might be a VERY attractive opportunity.

To paraphrase Bezos, big company's need for scale is the startup's opportunity.

thanks mate!

you would be surprised that people have managed to work with a lot less ;-)

"this sort of analysis" is a bit wide ranging, so can't comment, because some 'such' analysis might not sit pretty with twitter. But "this" is in line with policies, we in fact work with twitter and twitter is aware of this application.

This in fact has the potential to make twitter data useful for a new kind of user (product manager at a software product), so has the potential of making twitter useful for a sort of new segment of users.

yes it does. More about filters in the api docs here: http://api.frrole.com/v4/docs/user-profile

(warning: docs not fully updated yet. usual development to documentation lag:))

it relies on twitter data a good bit for personality insights Peter, so people you tried are not twitter users perhaps?

try a couple of random twitter users, don't have to be popular, if you just want to get a sense.

Thanks Ryan, this is not fully baked yet but def. not half-baked either. It will do what it is supposed to do.

Instagram is coming, and linkedin too. Soon, very!

yup just a bit of sentiment analysis, mood analysis, personality analysis, predicting how you would behave as an employee, as as an irate customer, determining your demographics, your social influence. Just those few bits:)

You should use this if you are a product manager whose product needs to know more attributes of its users. You can drop me a line at <username> AT frrole DOT com and i would be happy to walk you through the details.

This is a demo app. But yes, we should. point taken. thx.

Ha. Funny. But obv. no:) Maybe try a few that you don't share here..

Some things will be off Alex, a lot of it is algorithmic construction. Try it now, sometimes it takes more than a few seconds for the full profile to be constructed (if there is a queue etc)

The idea is to use "public" social data to build a secondary layer of intelligence that software products can use to personalize / be more consumer aware (primary layer is their captive data based intelligence).

We think that software has been more about automation of workflows so far, its time it started becoming intelligent.

P.S. replying, as i am the product owner for this:)

Like all things, it would have some good use and bad use. But technology WILL evolve, and many people would adopt. It ultimately settles at a healthy balance.

In general though, privacy has been dead on the net for a long time now. In life outside the net too, the guy opposite you could have the camera on while he holds the phone in his hand. So yes, some people would have issues with this, but generalizing that response to a majority would be exaggeration.

Ah, the perils of "having to" listen to the feedback!

There is absolutely nothing irresponsible about your idea. You are not the one terming something good and bad. If the data says so, if people say so, if the reports and incidents so, then it is just right that somebody let that be known, so that stakeholders can make an informed decision.

A local is usually going to know what are the spots to avoid at what time of the day, it is the outsider who does not. All you are doing is giving that same information to the outsider that the local has, and I think that is completely fair. If in the process, a particular neighbourhood or area shows up as unsafe, then that is nothing but the hard truth becoming known. Hard, but the truth. People need to learn to live with it.

You have to be there when the program runs. That is a criteria. Otherwise, location should not be a problem, I know of at least one startup here from India with India based co-founders who was part of the program.

I agree some and disagree some. Regarding M and N, I don't think they can control spam any more than m and n, given that M and N are going to be super-sets of root domains of m MULTIPLIEDBY Y{1 to j} and no of tweets of n MULTIPLIEDBY Y{1 to j} respectively, where j is the no of Y in each X.

Where I totally agree is the "Swarm" intelligence is superior to an individual philosophy. The same thing is dictating our thought process as well. Here: http://frrole.com/about-us

Where I again think differently is the 140 chars vs. the linked article line of thought. Grant that maybe we should call this "social headlines for your city" instead of "social newspaper..." ( 140 chars make for perfectly good headlines) but I believe that the information overload today is increasing drastically, attention span therefore (and otherwise) is decreasing significantly; so much so that more content, specially textual, is not the answer. Less content in fact is the answer, but chosen intelligently enough so that it does not leave things out.

Where I definitely agree with gayakwad is that these are fantastic inputs, the kind of inputs one definitely expects on HN. See from your profile that your areas of interest too are those that we are working on (Frrole is a lot, LOT more than no of retweets btw), maybe we should talk offline?

Yup, have heard that one a couple of times already, we are going to take care of that one VERY soon. Plan to aggregate tweets at country/global level too going forward, so have to do it in a way that we remove them from the city but not lose them totally.

Check out some of the deals, events etc, though. Good "democratized" info (I hope:)), including things that would never make it through standard aggregators.

Montreal is up in the next release.

And yes, about geo location, that is built in. But if you match neither the city nor the country, then it takes you to a global default.

thanks. Retweets is just one rule. Pretty much like google uses back links as an indicator, but has 200-300 other rules, we use retweets as an indicator but have 100+ rules probably. or around. These rules are spread across metadata analysis (language based, response type, location based filtering etc), statistical analysis(no of retweets, recency based scoring etc) and linguistic/textual analysis (syntactical construction, use of spammy words, characters etc)

Thanks, that is how it is intended to be in the longer term. But going to hit Twitter's rate limits very soon and access to full firehose is way too costly for a bootstrapped startup.

Hope to scale to 50+ cities by ourselves, validate traction with users from those 50 cities and then look at really big scaling, if it is getting some love:)

Agree, should have said "Building a tweetmeme of its own for every city". This is the first release, we are taking the no. of cities to 50+ with the next release in 6-8 weeks.

The focus till now has been on building algorithms that are kickass enough to filter junk out and keep only useful stuff in. Still WIP I know, but what do you think about that. Take http://frrole.com/san+francisco for example.

There is a lot of value in mining data off social media, but only if you can convert that into simple and easy use cases. We are doing something like that, and we are very happy about the way it is shaping up.

Yup, removing more noise from 'Everything' is high on the agenda. Other categories are pretty clean though, because they are focused on topics.

I would def have to say interesting because we are building off the same very concept. Not a jobs list, but what we call a social newspaper for the city. In fact, just submitted a thread myself, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295555

I had seen you post earlier when it made the top of HN, you are def doing some interesting work here.

If the links don't work above, then adding them here hoping they will work: First: https://twitter.com/#!/_iLiveLaughLove/status/14176392792625...

Second: http://frrole.com/san+francisco

Third: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BheVyS7c3UU

Building it as a social newspaper for your city. The most popular/useful tweets pulled out from the Twitter feeds and then categorized under sections like sports, events, deals, entertainment etc.