Update: Twitter’s Search API seems to timeout quite a bit so many search results don’t get any tweets linked. Try again later or refer to the screenshots below. Also, delicious.com is now testing an early version of this model for its homepage ranking.

Here it is  tweetnews.appspot.com

And an example query  yahoo

About six months ago I released a simple 100 line search application called TweetNews, which basically links tweets to the freshest Yahoo! News articles. The more related tweets an article has, the higher its rank. The tweet count and messages are presented underneath each result so that a user can read the social commentary inline with the article listing. It was developed more to demonstrate the openness and power of Yahoo! BOSS (you can read more about it in my previous posts here and here). Remarkably, many users found the service useful despite its slow performance, barebones UI, lack of homepage, domain, (you name it), etc.

Interestingly, the TweetNews concept has been popping up in my recent discussions around real-time search, so I felt it was about time to polish up TweetNews to serve as a better proof of concept.

Here are some of the new features:

• Sweet UI (kudos to Kara McCain & Aaron Wheeler for the awesome design and template)
• Continually Updated, Fresh Homepage (aggregates & ranks feeds like Techmeme, Delicious, Digg)
• Faster Performance
  
• Improved Algorithm
• Local Views (re-rank & link tweets from a select region)

.

Here’s a screenshot of the homepage:

.

And here’s an example of Local Views:

London’s View of ‘iphone’

Los Angeles’ View of ‘iphone’

Striking difference between Americans (actually just SoCal) and the British right there 🙂

I think the Local Views concept is pretty promising, although there’s plenty of room for improvement (use BOSS region filters, access Twitter’s Firehose Feed for more granularity, etc.).

Which is why, like I did with the last version, plan to open source all the code powering this application (just need a little more time to get it reviewed).

Interestingly, the homepage system in this package is very general. Just pass it any list of RSS feeds and it’ll do the clustering, tweet linking, ranking, and page generation automatically every X minutes for you. Anyone want a fresh, personalized Techmeme? Let me know if that sounds interesting.

Please keep in mind that this is still a simple, early prototype to show how one can use BOSS to experiment with very interesting data sources like Twitter to tackle big problems like real-time search.