In praise of the @BFI's #BFIWhatsOn visual bulletin

I love this, from the BFI (British Film Institute's cinema, Southbank, Waterloo). They've trained me to search Twitter for from:bfi #bfiwhatson if I'm near Waterloo of an evening and want to see what's on at their cinema.

The panel below comes from the search results above, restricted to images. I love the simple layout and the fact that each picture conveys every bit of information I could possibly need in the most succinct visual format. Aren't they lovely.

I don't know how long they've been doing this, or when I first noticed them but I wish that more venues did this.

Twitter's spam reporting leaves a lot to be desired

I have recently spotted a lot of identical or suspiciously similar tweets on the #homeopathy hashtag coming from 'bots' (automated fake accounts). They are indiscriminately retweeting and favouriting positive and negative tweets about the subject so it's not clear if they're on a particular 'side' or what their purpose is. They are also tweeting more generally about health and weight loss so I would have to assume they exist to tweet a particular link or two and are covering their backs by tweeting other health-related stuff as well, ie hiding in plain sight. It's a popular tactic.

As they deliberately avoid sending spam tweets blocking them 'for' posting spam is not quite right and Twitter's options for reporting them correctly are therefore a bit limited.

The accounts are almost always female (according to their avatar) with digits at the end of their name, eg Jodie123. Their bios look similarly cut and paste with liberal use of dividers like ✦, ✶ or ✪ (I have to admit I use | and / in my bio, or did until I recently changed it).

Examples below

• TV addict ✦ Professional Speaker ✦ Soccer fanatic ✦ Subtly charming geek ✦ 53 Countries since 2012
• Social media fan ✶ Author of fantasy books ✶ Travel consultant ✶ Beauty appreciator ✶ Technology lover
• Advocate for human dignity ✪ Spirituality ninja ✪ Sunglass fan ✪ Detoxification ✪ Nerd 

They are mostly retweeting genuine tweets so their spam-like behaviour is more subtle and probably only noticeable if you are the one whose tweets (or tweets you're mentioned in) are being favourited ('liked') or retweeted - it's not apparent just from looking at their timeline, you have to be aware of several similar accounts to get the full picture.

In other words you can only really see the spam if you're in a position to be able to see the spam!

An example would be that you've tweeted about #homeopathy and a lot of similar-looking accounts retweet it. I suppose it's a tiny bit like #EverydaySexism which is largely invisible unless you're a woman who regularly experiences a range of men making comments at you. Different people moving through an otherwise identical space see and experience it very differently.

I am reporting these accounts as spam though I've not seen many of them being removed (I suspect Twitter just disagrees with my assessment because each account doesn't, individually, look particularly spammy). I'm not sure if Twitter pays attention to my pattern of reporting (ie several similar accounts in a short space of time) but I wish they did because then I think they'd notice the problem.

Perhaps Twitter isn't particularly bothered about these types of accounts. They aren't very harmful, beyond spouting nonsense into the Twittersphere (but let's face it we all do that too), they're not abusive and they're not posting the same tweeted link over and over again. But they don't contribute to the ecosphere.

While we're at it I still hate all those Sumall and Commun.it tweets that thank a bunch of strangers for tweeting (and do it in such a way that the tweet is visible to ALL of the tweeter's followers, and not just the strangers they're thanking - ugh).

What a depressing thought that future internet archaeologists will be left with the "(insight by commun.it)" tweets which, by volume alone, must surely be taking up plenty of Twitter's server space. Have a scroll though some of them and despair ;) Drivel.


 

What's a hashtag?

Whenever you write something with http://www.xyz/ in it, or x.y@blah.com most computers recognise that this is a web address or an email address and turn them into an active link - clicking on them will open the web page or launch a new email message.

In Twitter, and in similar programmes, adding # in front of a word does two things. It turns the word into an active link (clicking on it from within Twitter or Twitter app will take you to the search page containing all instances of that hashtag) and it also collects up all instances of it that can be shown together (ie aggregates the tweets containing the hashtag).

This means that other aggregators, such as WTHashtag (What the Hashtag) or Twapperkeeper - examples below, can take the feed and present it on their page (ie syndicating the content on another page) - this is basically what RSS feeds do. RSS generally stands for 'really simple syndication'.

Examples
Twitter search, for #ADA2010 tag which corresponds to the American Diabetes Association conference tweets (note that # is expressed as %23) http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23ada2010

wthashtag for ADA2010 (note that it picks up the #tag but removes the # from the URL)
http://wthashtag.com/Ada2010

Following conference hashtag tweets in real time and saving them for later

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UPDATE 7 July 2011: Google Realtime is no longer with us. Initially it seemed to be temporarily offline while under-bonnet tinkering happened and it was assumed it would be hooked up with Google+ however it now seems that Google is no longer accessing Twitter's stream as the deal ended on 2 July 2011. This isn't great.

Also, see the more up to date post linked in the column on the right hand side, about a list of Twitter tools.

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All the fashionable conferences or events have a hashtag. This turns a mere word into a clickable link which takes you to a 'channel' of tweets all talking about the same thing.

There are lots of ways of following these tweeted hashtags, in real time, and you can also save all the tweets for later. Here are some ways of doing this.

Example hashtag is #scio10 which stands for Science Online 2010.

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EDIT: 7 November 2010 - for further investigation: "Tweetdoc" as suggested by @AISSMa
- it seems to create a rather useful and straightforward PDF for you, which is a plus.
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1. Twitter itself
http://search.twitter.com - type in #scio10 or scio10 and sit back and watch. You might have to press 'refresh' every now and again (I think this depends on your browser) but it's pretty good.
Realtime? Yes
Archive? Not long-term.
Keeps picture of who is tweeting linked to their tweet? Yes

2. FriendFeed
The official conference FriendFeed room is http://friendfeed.com/scienceonline2010 which incorporates hashtag mentions and official comment from the dedicated twitter feed @scio10

My only bleat is that FriendFeed tends to lose the details of who said what, something that some of the other services seem to be able to keep (see this pic which gives an example http://www.flickr.com/photos/jodiepedia/3977940848/).

For just the tweets containing the hashtag though, use this link http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%23scio10

FriendFeed does two things - it lets you read Twitter feeds, but it also lets you comment on them and write directly to FF.

See also - Cunning use of FriendFeed - find old tweets, yours or others - for more on why I really like certain features of FriendFeed.
Realtime? Yes, freakishly good - see http://friendfeed.com/public for terrifying proof.
Archive? Excellent, persists for a long time.
Keeps picture? Not for generic feed into room, yes for individual (if on FriendFeed).

3. wthashtag - What the Hashtag
Any topic that's trending will show up automatically in wthashtag. If a topic isn't trending, then the wthashtag needs to be set up manually, for which you need a (free) account. The advantage of this is not so much the real time view of tweets (I can't remember how good this is) but the ability to generate a transcript of the last day's tweets.
Realtime? I think so, yes
Archive? Yes, but limited and not permanent
Keeps pictures? Yes

4. Twapperkeeper
#scio10 Twapperkeeper feed
No account needed to set up a twapperkeeper, although account required if you want to do more with it I think. It's a while since I've used it but I was very impressed. You can even set up a filter so that the hashtag plus another word will filter into a particular folder - this might be useful where you have several sessions running concurrently.

For example, during the recent #scidebate (debate between Ben Goldacre and Paul Drayson) I toyed with splitting examples of good science reporting from bad by using !g and !b in addition to #scidebate. Technically it worked perfectly (but it turned out that artificially splitting articles in this way was a bit of a palaver so we all quietly forgot about it) and you can see that the tweets are still there http://twapperkeeper.com/scidebate/
Realtime? I think so, but honestly can't remember
Archive? Yes, awesome
Keeps pictures? Yes

4.5. Hashtag.org
Haven't investigated it yet but looks interesting. Hat tip @zeno001

5. Tweetdeck - iPhone app
Although I do have this somewhere on my laptop I only really use it as an app on my iPhone and so my experience of it is pretty much limited to that. This requires download whereas everything else here is web-based.

Tweetdeck lets you create a deck of tweets based on a hashtag, which you can watch in real time.
Realtime? Yes
Archive? Not that I'm aware of
Keeps pictures? Yes

6. Twitterfall
Very good, although a little bit fiddly. Type in your hashtag and it does the rest.
Realtime? Yes
Archive? Not that I'm aware of
Keeps pictures? Yes

7. Monitter
Very similar to Twitterfall, but with three 'decks'.
Realtime? Yes
Archive? Not that I'm aware of
Keeps pictures? Yes

I've watched or saved a lot of conference tweets in the time I've been on Twitter and have used Tweetdeck to interact when there, Twitterfall if watching elsewhere, FriendFeed for an augmented experience, Twitter itself as a back channel (and FriendFeed) and both wthashtag and Twapperkeeper to save it all for later. I think Twitterfall is used quite successfully by events folks to show the tweets live on screen.

These are just the ones I've used or heard of. Doubtless there are others...