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Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

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Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#51

Post by chrisfrantz »

mickdaisy wrote: post #41
mobileexpert wrote: post #36

Are you using public/legit APIs for all these services? Seems like you might be at risk for TOS violation for at least a couple.

Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!

What do you mean by “outsource the risk”?

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#52

Post by mickdaisy »

chrisfrantz wrote: post #51
mickdaisy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!

What do you mean by “outsource the risk”?

I mean I hope that if I pay someone else to harvest my drugs and I don't know how they do it, then I have some level of plausible deniability, but that just went out the window

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#53

Post by onli »

mickdaisy wrote: post #45
alberth wrote: post #34

It's like https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper (seriously). Love the homepage. EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found". Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.

Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.

Also on the site itself, because I did not realize that at all! Good to know!

I know that one of my sites is mentioned on one of the services that is not twitter, and not seeing it in the preview results gave me pause.

Nice site otherwise, best of luck!

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#54

Post by mickdaisy »

onli wrote: post #53
mickdaisy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.

Also on the site itself, because I did not realize that at all! Good to know! I know that one of my sites is mentioned on one of the services that is not twitter, and not seeing it in the preview results gave me pause. Nice site otherwise, best of luck!

Ok yeah that's a clear need - set expectations that results from other platforms take a few to show up. Thanks for the push to correct

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#56

Post by mickdaisy »

For anyone curious about the services being used to support platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#58

Post by offtop5 »

mickdaisy wrote: post #10
offtop5 wrote: post #8

Anyway to plug in sentiment analysis ? I would love for you to run this through IBM Watson or something so I can see if people are saying positive things about my brand

Yeah, I'm super excited to build this out. I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR right now) In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).

Charge people up-front for this.

Watson is very expensive after all.

Alternatively you can use an npm module to determine basic sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

#59

Post by corytheboyd »

mickdaisy wrote: post #46
corytheboyd wrote: post #42

Quick feedback, on mobile the header takes up about half of the viewport

Yeah, I'm a garbage developer, mobile needs some work. I'll prioritize this - thank you for the heads up

No I think you did a great job here! Just helping out :)
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