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
- add ‘hashtags’ as a twitterer you follow (they will automagically reciprocate, and will then be tracking your posts), and
- 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>
