The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has published an article for Scientific American. I think everyone should read it.
Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
TwitBlock is over a year old now. One thing we have tried to avoid is being an authority on what is and isn’t spam. We have deliberately avoided blacklisting accounts. The idea has always been to empower the community to collectively decide what is spam by bringing the most likely junk accounts to the surface. We provide some very simple analysis, and indicate how many other people also think an account is spam.
A blacklist is now in effect
For reasons that I’ll explain below, we have decided to implement a blacklist system as of today. Blacklisted Twitter accounts always show up with a 100% confidence score and will appear at the top of scan results. You can still see the standard spam score indicators, as the screen-grab below shows.
Two related events happened yesterday, which caused me to write this post.
1. Facebook announced their new messaging system. Project Titan, ‘Gmail killer’, etc..
2. A series of fake Twitter accounts sprung up, offering invites to Facebook’s new system.
I’ve been thinking a lot about sentiment analysis recently; for a number of reasons:
Datasift (a new product by Tweetmeme, currently in rather exclusive alpha) offers sentiment analysis as part of their streaming filters for Twitter.
Valley-based Fflick are developing their own sentiment engine via machine learning algorithms. The current manifestation of this is a movie review site, but they will be pursuing other verticals – no doubt once the tech has improved and they’ve got some $$s.
Qwiki, which I wrote about yesterday, appears to be on the artificial intelligence trail too. The task of establishing whether content is relevant/important/canonical is an incredibly daunting task to automate.
Finally [prompting this post] this morning I see a product launched by Lewis PR: Chatterscope monitors brand mentions and performs sentiment analysis – A free alternative to Radian6 and Alterian, perhaps? Monitoring and alert functionality is obviously useful, but sentiment analysis – that’s the marketing holy grail, and I’ve always been sceptical.
Today, I’ve been trying out the alpha version of Qwiki, which was unveiled at Techcrunch Disrupt on Sep 27th.
It’s ambitious technology. Their goal is to “improve the way people experience information” and [even more ambitiously] to “advance information technology to the point it acts human”. These two statements indicate somewhat separate challenges. That first point is largely a delivery problem, the latter keeps Nobel Prize winners awake at night.