Building on Jeff Jarvis' Idea For Twitter Reviews

Jeff Jarvis wants to use Twitter as a review engine, where people could post reviews -- on movies, TV, restaurants, whatever -- and others could track them. He discusses some approaches that he has tried.

I suggested using Chris Messina's #hashtags, as now implemented by the folks at www.hashtags.org. To use, you only have to

1. add 'hashtags' as a twitterer you follow (they will automagically reciprocate, and will then be tracking your posts), and
   
2. you then tag things.

For example, I twittered this last night: "Jeff+Jarvis is talking about Twitter for real-time #reviews but seems oblivious to #hashtags as an option." After that was massaged (which took about 2 minutes), the tweet showed up at both www.hashtags.org/tags/jeff+jarvis and www.hashtags.com/tags/reviews. (For some strange reason, they block the use of #hashtags as a tag. Weird.)

Note that all tags tracked by www.hashtags.org have an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to your interests.

Jeff acknowledged my recommendation in an update:

[from @twitcrit: instareviews]

Any better ideas of how we can aggregate our instant reviews?

: Later: Stowe Boyd suggestings using hashtags: #twitcrit. And then I can feed that RSS onto a page. But can I follow a hashtag on Twitter? That’s what I want to do.

Dave Winer in an email exchange asks whether I want the product to look like Club140. Yes. But I also want to follow the nanoreviews in Twitter. Perhaps I want too much.

Perhaps the answer is to take the RSS feed from a beacon tag (a predefined tag that we all agree to use in a certain way - Greg Narain) and use that as a grouping for all reviews. I am proposing #* for all reviews. Note that this takes only two characters, which is critical.

So if I am reviewing a movie I would say "#Beowulf is no good unless you see the Imax version. #* #movies" and it gets tracked three ways, by the name tag, by the movies tag, and by the metatag #* for all reviews.

I juryrigged something that may be what Jarvis wants. I took the feed from the #* tag at www.hashtags.org, and used www.twitterfeed.com to push that into a new Twitter account I set up, called hashstar (for #*). In principle, it should work as planned. All reviews in Twitter tagged with #* will wind up reposted at hashstar. However, Twitterfeed has real bandwidth limitations, so this will only work as a proof of concept. Smallest polling cycle is 30 minutes, and an upper limit of 5 posts.

Anyone have an alternative to Twitterpost that is less limited?

<update> There is a hiccup in the handoff from www.hashtags.org RSS feed to the reporting via Twitterfeed (apparently Twitterfeed doesn't like the lack of time/date info in the feeds). So at the moment I am borked.

Someone asked about the 'hall of mirrors' effect: if the tagged tweets are reposted, won't there be an infinite cascade of tags and posts? This won't happen because I have won't have hashtags tracking the hashstar account. No worries on that front.

But it's not working, for the other reason. Grumble. Any other alternatives to Twitterfeed? rss2twitter is another service, but appears to be dead.

</update>

Comments

[John Eckman]

I had the best luck taking this PHP script for posting from RSS to Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ypjuve

And then setting a cron job to run it every so often.

(I had to modify parse.php to use curl rather than fopen, since some hosting providers don't allow that).

In other words you may need to roll your own here.

[Aaron Farnham]

Hmmm... We don't block #hashtags as a tag. A quick look shows your tweet at http://hashtags.org/tag/hashtags/

I'll see if I can't get date/time put on the feeds for you today.

Thanks,
~Aaron

[Conor O'Neill]

Stowe, we've had a Twitter Reviews system running since June 07 (same idea also runs on Jaiku and Pownce). You write reviews in a particular format like so:

Review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

and we collect them on LouderVoice if you let us know about your Twitter account. Anyone can search on them in LouderVoice (where they are presented as hreviews) and we send them to the source Tweet.

Details on our blog

We'd be happy to add support for hashtags too.

[Mahesh CR]

I have been doing a little book reading session for the last couple of weeks and used hashtags for couple of days to classify the twits.

Like your idea of #* for all reviews. Extending this idea can give us a whole little one letter taxonomy!

#$ - Finance
#? - question. will make hoosgot.com irrelevant
etc..

As an alternative for Twitterfeed why not look at Yahoo Pipes? From what I have seen it gives enough control to be able to filter the standard twitter RSS feeds.

Thoughts?

[Conor O'Neill]

One extra note: we actually ran with a similar setup to the one you are proposing from Jun-Nov. Basically anyone could friend @review, we'd friend back and then we'd collect all the reviews. But our user feedback was that they wanted their Twitter reviews associated to their specific LouderVoice account rather than being in a giant pool.

I'll see if we can get basic hashtags support in this week. The only tiny drawback is that #'s are used for channels on Jaiku so we may go with a slight variation for that platform.

[Bernie Goldbach]

I'm kinda suprised you did not see LouderVoice running at Reboot 9 because a few of the Irish participants were texting LouderMinis from Copenhagen. The integration with Twitter and Jaiku work really simply and reviews I make from the main website land on my Six Apart blog. In my opinion, if someone is going to duplicate the LouderVoice effort, you should try to raise the bar to incorporate other social media such as video or tagged images.

[Eric Eggertson]

I have to admit I've ignored the hashtags thing, just because I never saw an explanation of what you were trying to accomplish (though I guessed pretty accurately).

I like this micro formatting idea, especially for reviews and other Tweets (perhaps #YVR - the three letter code for an airport - for updates that other travellers could use to warn them of congestion, etc.?)

I'll be following this discussion, and trying out a few reviews with #*.

[Ontario Emperor]

Trying the "why not both?" idea, I started a tweet with both @twitcrit and #*. If it hadn't been for the Twitterfeed issues, everything would have worked perfectly. As it was, my tweet showed up at @twitcrit, hashtags.org, and Club 140, and it theoretically would have shown up at @hashstar if the technical issues could be resolved.

This illustrates an issue with multiple standards in general: namely, how can someone comply with multiple standards without breaking adherence to one of the standards? In this case, @twitcrit and #* are compatible with each other and can be used together, which is a good thing.

[Conor O'Neill]

LouderVoice support for hashtags in our mini-reviews on Twitter is now live. Example here. Pownce and Jaiku later today.