In-A-Gist Blog

How we rate content at inagist.com

Its been often asked of us, "How do you decide scores for the tweets that you show on inagist.com?" Well here is how we determine what to show and what not to show. 

We divide tweets coming in from the Twitter stream into 2 categories, ones which have a URL and ones which do not. The assumption being that tweets with URL tend to be teasers to the content at the linked URL. Tweets from different users mentioning the same URL (possibly through a URL shortner) are scored against the URL.

Another basic assumption is how we classify your follow community. The follow community is composed of the people you follow directly and people whom you follow indirectly through lists. If you follow a person directly we give a higher score to activity from that user opposed to activity from a user in one of the lists that you follow. The reasoning here being that people you directly follow is what you see on most Twitter clients by default and possibly people whom you care about more.

Once your twitter id is enabled on inagist.com, we fetch your follow community and start watching the twitter stream on your behalf for activity from, or about, the people in this community. A retweet or a reply to a tweet makes an activity on a tweet. A retweet of a person you directly follow by a person in one of your lists, gains a higher score than a retweet of that person by someone not in your community. And a retweet of that person by a person you directly follow gains an even higher score. Similar scoring applies to replies except that reply from a person not in your community to a person in your community does not count. Conversations between people you directly follow gain higher scores than conversations across people in your lists. 

We present tweets which have a high score sorted by time on your user page. And yes options are coming soon to sort by score and filter by the score.

We do all of this in real-time for each enabled user on inagist. To be reasonable on the costing behind all of this we use bounded caches for scoring tweets. So if you have more people in your follow community you will see tweets expiring faster from your main page. We do archive these tweets which we discover, so you can go back and see those tweets which we had picked out in the past. Clicking on a list name pulls in tweets from the archive for that particular list.

Conversations page gives you more context on the activity surrounding these filtered tweets. Clicking on the activity icon   takes you to the conversation page where all the replies to a tweet are shown in order. We also present two different views on these replies. Popular replies are ones which have been further replied to or retweeted. Replies from your friends brings out only replies from your community.

We encourage you to sign in and see this in action for yourself. Also get into Twitter and start following lists of your choice on topics that interest you, or create lists of your own and curate your sources. May we recommend verified, tlists and scobleizer for a variety of lists to get you started. Continue using twitter with your favorite client and inagist.com to surface interesting tweets from all your sources, we assure you, you will not miss a single one of those interesting 140 characters.

Posted by Jebu Ittiachen 

Introducing inagist.com

How often has twitter been your source of breaking news? Think Mangalore plane crash, gulf oil spill updates. How many times in the recent past did you learn about those tid-bits from your twitter stream? Think Google Pacman doodle, iPhone 4G leaks. Now think how often have you felt that an important tweet has gone un noticed because of the volume of tweets that keeps coming into you, or of how often you have refrained from following people because you are not able to keep up with your existing tweets. 

If you are not so much into twitter but often heard about it, have you wondered if you could get information that mattered to you out of twitter? Could twitter be your portal to the web? 

We present inagist.com, a real-time tweet filtering system, which sifts through those thousands of tweets which are flowing in to your account and show you just those ones which are interesting, or thought to be of value by other people. We rank tweets based on the perceived relevance of the content of a tweet. We then show you those tweets which are relevant, sorted either by time or relevance. You can do the normal activities then on a tweet of replying, retweeting, favoriting etc. Additionally we pull in url summaries, media previews in place to give a complete reading experience. Tweets are pulled in from people and lists you follow, so go ahead either follow that person or add him/her to a list of yours, or follow those lists that @scobleizer has painstakingly put together. We advice you to follow directly those people that matter to you so your twitter page looks clean and interesting, your inagist page will sort and rank tweets from all those numerous others. Once you authorize your Twitter account with InAGist we regularly sync your account information to keep abreast of your follow changes. Go ahead try it out at http://inagist.com/<your twitter handle>, we are at jebui, chjeeves, netroy.

For those twitter unaware we present inagist channel pages. These are curated twitter accounts on specific topics, world news is at worldnews.inagist.com, India news at india.inagist.com, geeks at geek.inagist.com. We have created twitter accounts which follow sources on these topics so you can come in and get your taste of tweets. Tweets from these acounts are ranked as explained before so you get to see only those tweets from these sources which are relevant. All those channels are listed at twitter.com/InAGist/channels/members. 

Now we are still in early stages of development and not opened to the whole twitter crowd. Do check if your account is already enabled at http://inagist.com/<your twitter handle>, if not please authorize inagist app and we will enable as we go along.

Your feedback is important to us, feel free to get back with comments, feature requests, bouqets, brick bats - @inagist is the preferred channel. InAGist is a product offering from Iyotta Software.

Posted by InAGist