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TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

blog.directededge.com

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Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#11

Post by epi0Bauqu »

A few suggestions:

1) I would have sent the tweet about your site IF I could have revised it, which wasn't working for me (not sure if it should have).

2) It would be great if you could expand people's stream to see more than one tweet (if wanted).

3) It would be great if you could show the score, and at the same time give many more recommendations (perhaps with a more button). That way, you can still claim it wasn't a great match (by showing the score) but still giving more to those who want them (like me).

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#12

Post by wheels »

champion wrote: post #10

Cool, looks nice. There are several other friend recommenders out there: whoshouldifollow.com (which I helped build), Twubble, MrTweet. I'd be curious to know more about the recommendation engine -- my recommendations skewed toward popular entities like "Whole Foods", "Zappos" and "DiningFever". Interestingly, although I follow a lot of tech/web/rails people, I didn't see any obvious folks in my recommendations.

We spider using random graph walks, and it makes sure that some x users in y directions and z steps away from you are spidered. However, this was the first time we'd tried to run the engine on an "incomplete" (meaning that we don't have the whole graph) data set and there are some quirks in the recommendations. It was hard to tweak the algorithm, because until there was a bunch of data, we weren't sure what tweaks would be necessary.

The skewing happens because we first check those x and y to see if we've already got enough data before running the spider. If we happen to have already spidered heavily in one subset of your friends, then you'll see the results skewed towards those until we end up spidering the others.

The other skewing, which other works better on complete graphs is that it tries to do some weighting based on how many incoming and outgoing edges users have (friends, followers), which if your tech friends have a whole lot of friends and followers and you don't, might be part of why they'd be less highly rated.

For the moment we're not really trying to compete with Mr. Tweet (though, when I tried their recommendations they were pretty bad) and whoshouldifollow (which does pretty well) -- it was just a neat way of showing off some of our engine and applying it to a different area.

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#13

Post by wheels »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #11

A few suggestions: 1) I would have sent the tweet about your site IF I could have revised it, which wasn't working for me (not sure if it should have). 2) It would be great if you could expand people's stream to see more than one tweet (if wanted). 3) It would be great if you could show the score, and at the same time give many more recommendations (perhaps with a more button). That way, you can still claim it wasn't…

All good ideas and things I had to fight off in one-more-thing-ism mode before we put up the beta. Those should all appear in a soon-ish update.

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#14

Post by wheels »

apgwoz wrote: post #6

There's an OAuth beta now. I'll wait until they make use of it.

Originally I wanted to do all of the password wrangling in javascript so that it never hit our servers. We only need it to make the follow buttons and the little viral message work (we ask for confirmation before posting and say exactly what it'll post to minimize the evil), but using HTTP basic authentication with Javascript seems to be a no-go, so we just bounce the request off our server. All of the data that we pull is just public data that's grabbed with our white-listed account.

I'll look into OAuth in the future. At the time I just saw in the Twitter API docs, "For the time being, HTTP Basic Authentication is the only supported authentication scheme."

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#15

Post by FictiveEvan »

wheels wrote: post #14
apgwoz wrote: post #6

There's an OAuth beta now. I'll wait until they make use of it.

Originally I wanted to do all of the password wrangling in javascript so that it never hit our servers. We only need it to make the follow buttons and the little viral message work (we ask for confirmation before posting and say exactly what it'll post to minimize the evil), but using HTTP basic authentication with Javascript seems to be a no-go, so we just bounce the request off our server. All of the data that we p…

What problem did you run into doing HTTP Basic Auth with javascript?

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#16

Post by champion »

wheels wrote: post #12
champion wrote: post #10

Cool, looks nice. There are several other friend recommenders out there: whoshouldifollow.com (which I helped build), Twubble, MrTweet. I'd be curious to know more about the recommendation engine -- my recommendations skewed toward popular entities like "Whole Foods", "Zappos" and "DiningFever". Interestingly, although I follow a lot of tech/web/rails people, I didn't see any obvious folks in my recommendations.

We spider using random graph walks, and it makes sure that some x users in y directions and z steps away from you are spidered. However, this was the first time we'd tried to run the engine on an "incomplete" (meaning that we don't have the whole graph) data set and there are some quirks in the recommendations. It was hard to tweak the algorithm, because until there was a bunch of data, we weren't sure what tweaks wo…

Thanks for the reply. Like the idea of making is simple for sites to incorporate a recommendation engine without reinventing the wheel.

Re: TweetRex launched: Twitter friend recommender built on the Directed Edge engine

#17

Post by wheels »

FictiveEvan wrote: post #15
wheels wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally I wanted to do all of the password wrangling in javascript so that it never hit our servers. We only need it to make the follow buttons and the little viral message work (we ask for confirmation before posting and say exactly what it'll post to minimize the evil), but using HTTP basic authentication with Javascript seems to be a no-go, so we just bounce the request off our server. All of the data that we p…

What problem did you run into doing HTTP Basic Auth with javascript?

Security error. Which seemed to kind of make sense. Didn't seem to be allowed via Javascript. Googling now it seems like it might be possible if you write the header to the AJAX HTTP request explicitly. I might play more with that later. Granted, there, for most users, the difference would be minimal since most presumably wouldn't read the page's Javascript to verify what we'd said.
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