Reputation (trust) vs. User Interest (ego)
Posted by Tim Hastings in Commentary on August 3, 2010
When trying to find interesting people online, it is useful to be able to differentiate between somebody who is very interested in a particular subject from somebody who has a good reputation for that subject. In the example below, there is a very shy but talented Elvis impersonator. By examining the tweets, we can see [...]
Twitter User Reputation Computed from Tweets
Posted by Tim Hastings in Commentary on November 26, 2009
The Twitter ecosystem has lots of different reputation mechanisms at the moment and I would like to discuss these and then make my own contribution. User Generated Directories There are directories like wefollow.com where users add themselves by choosing which categories they belong. This is effective, but I see there are some flaws with this [...]
Incubation Over, Server Migration Complete
Posted by Tim Hastings in Uncategorized on November 23, 2009
After 9 months sharing an Amazon EC2 instance with some of my other experimental projects it was finally time for TagWalk to “fly the nest”. The low spec virtual server was just not enough for TagWalk’s storage and data processing requirements. Looking at the economics of cost vs. performance, it made sense to pony up [...]
Image for Retweet or Share with Twitter Button
Posted by Tim Hastings in News on July 17, 2009
After adding the “Share with Twitter” feature to TagWalk, I was not happy with the buttons available so I have modified the Twitter OAuth button. Please feel free to use it if you would like:
User Profiles Now Showing
Posted by Tim Hastings in News on July 17, 2009
After some recent work to TagWalk the site now shows user profiles. A local copy of the profiles are kept in the database and cached in memcache so page rendering is as fast as possible. Profiles are refreshed if a user posts or is mentioned in the tweets proceeds by the tweet processors and the [...]
Twitter Statistics Now Showing on TagWalk
Posted by Tim Hastings in News on June 15, 2009
This evening I have mostly been doing front end work on TagWalk, exposing the behind-the-scenes computed numbers. These numbers very useful, but previous attempts to display them had looked ugly. I took some inspiration from the way that Twitter displays their follower count information, and I am very pleased with the result. TagWalk breaks tweets [...]
PHP Problem, Failed to Open Stream – File Too Large
Posted by Tim Hastings in News on May 19, 2009
Tonight I am going to be modifying TagWalk to workaround a 32-bit file handling limitation in PHP. The fopen function creates an internal data structure to keep track of the file and the current read position. On a 32-bit platform, the default PHP build uses a signed integer as the file cursor so this gives [...]
TagWalk first demo
Posted by Tim Hastings in News on April 23, 2009
Hello. My name is Tim Hastings (@timhastings), and welcome to the TagWalk blog. A blog intended to chronicle the developments of http://tagwalk.com/ TagWalk has been a side project of mine which I started around February 2009. On Monday night (20th April), I demonstrated progress-so-far to a small and friendly crowd at Geekup Preston. It was [...]
Experimental Foursquare Recommendations
Posted by Tim Hastings in Commentary on August 4, 2010
Foursquare and Locations After many months of operation, TagWalk has collected over 100 million tweets, and tracked over 40 million URLs. There are increasing numbers of Foursquare URLs popping up, and due to good RESTful design from the Foursquare team, I noticed that when users tweet their checkins, it is possible to pattern match their [...]
foursquare, mashups, recommendation, twitter
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