Twimpact Work In Progress

Twimpact has been running smoothly in its small niche of the internet, and we're currently trying to improve the way retweets are crawled and analyzed. The problem is that people often add some comment to the end of the original message, and also edit the original message such that it's not that straightforward to really know whether you have a new tweet or not.

There are also some more bugs, which will be fixed soon. For example, apparently, we weren't handling underscores in user names correctly such that "RT @nfl_games" became a retweet of the user "nfl" with the message "games", which has been retweeted more than 1800 times.

We currently also don't filter out users who retweet a tweet repeatedly or who retweet their own tweets, leading to all kinds of retweet bots and retweet-spam networks being high up in our retweet trends. While that may not be so informative, it is still interesting to see what kind of business ideas people come up with around the twitter platform.

For example, dannywhitehouse apparently has a service called twitter-bomb which I guess does all kinds of nasty things which are certainly not covered by twitter's Terms of Service, but who still managed to amass more than thirteen thousand followers.

In any, case we'll be rolling out the improvements soon, maybe this week, so stay tuned! The only problem we'll run into is that we have to reprocess all the tweets already in our database 8-O