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Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

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Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#11

Post by danso »

The code here is well executed and I think you have a smart idea to tap into the Twitter visual stream...but to paraphrase a famous researcher (or engineer, I forgot which), the world has an abundance of information but a lack of attention (and this was said decades ago).

There's not really a benefit to seeing a realtime stream of Twitter photos. In fact, if you were to show me photos that were timedelayed by minutes, hours, or even days, how would I even know the difference? Realtime is effective to get a grasp of what's going on now, but there's no way to discern that from a raw real-time feed. As an example, you don't get the "pulse" of Twitter by reading the firehose, but through the trending hashtags/terms, which are pre-processed and clustered.

In other words, I think there's a lot you could do by clustering/filtering around several kinds of facets. For example, show just pics from accounts with more than x number of followers as a proxy for "quality". That'd be a start and a relatively easy one to implement.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#12

Post by jknightco »

timdorr wrote: post #4

Maybe it's just the time of day (9AM EST), but the feed seems to be dominated by Asian (Japanese and Korean, in particular) users. Is there a cycle to this sort of thing or is it only picking up photos from that part of the world?

I noticed the same thing. Perhaps it could be an effect of how those populations use Twitter as well?

Regardless, this project is awesome, and way too fun to watch. Even if 90% of the photos are of the same Korean kid with the red bowl-cut.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#13

Post by jknightco »

danso wrote: post #11

The code here is well executed and I think you have a smart idea to tap into the Twitter visual stream...but to paraphrase a famous researcher (or engineer, I forgot which), the world has an abundance of information but a lack of attention (and this was said decades ago). There's not really a benefit to seeing a realtime stream of Twitter photos. In fact, if you were to show me photos that were timedelayed by minutes…

Not everything has to have a benefit. This is an extremely entertaining project, something OP worked on over several weekends because it was something he wanted to see exist. No need to get all high and mighty about purpose and benefit.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#14

Post by stevekemp »

It looks cute, but the biggest frustration was trying to click on a thumbnail to see the full sized image, only for the image to have changed in the meantime.

I kept half-seeing interesting images, but being unable to see them fully because my mousing was too slow.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#15

Post by danso »

jknightco wrote: post #13
danso wrote: post #11

The code here is well executed and I think you have a smart idea to tap into the Twitter visual stream...but to paraphrase a famous researcher (or engineer, I forgot which), the world has an abundance of information but a lack of attention (and this was said decades ago). There's not really a benefit to seeing a realtime stream of Twitter photos. In fact, if you were to show me photos that were timedelayed by minutes…

Not everything has to have a benefit. This is an extremely entertaining project, something OP worked on over several weekends because it was something he wanted to see exist. No need to get all high and mighty about purpose and benefit.

I agree, but I think you haven't actually visited the OP's link, where he states:

> "People are sharing thousands of photos with each other every second of every day, everywhere in the world. By tapping into just a fraction of the torrent, it becomes easy to see patterns that range among breaking events, popular trends, cultural attitudes, and individual expression."

Given that that is one of his intentions, I'm trying to give advice on where the OP could further iterate upon his stated goal. If a hacker spends weeks on a cool project, I'd think he deserves some well-intentioned suggestions on how to even better it.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#16

Post by TruthSHIFT »

timdorr wrote: post #4

Maybe it's just the time of day (9AM EST), but the feed seems to be dominated by Asian (Japanese and Korean, in particular) users. Is there a cycle to this sort of thing or is it only picking up photos from that part of the world?

According to ComScore, Asian Twitter traffic surpassed North American Twitter traffic in 2010. So, it's possible that Twitter just has a lot more users in Asia.

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2010/8/Indon...

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#18

Post by Wilya »

ux-app wrote: post #5

Interesting project. Would be keen to hear about technical details. How real-time is the data? I noticed a lot of repeating images so I'm assuming the data is collected and batch processed? Or are the images being fetched directly using the twitpic API? Any reason for using canvas element instead of images or CSS backgrounds? My gut would suggest that loading an image and then painting to the canvas would incur a gre…

Not the author but:

- Repeated images probably come from quoted tweets (when you quote a tweet and reply by adding something). If you pull a twitter API feed, you'll get many of these.

- Not sure, but it's possible that ever-changing images cause lots of reflow. What happens between the moment you set the src attribute and the moment the image loads ? I'd have to test, but I think a reflow of everything is worse than painting to canvas.

- Looking through dev tools, images are hotlinked.

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