Comment 2: http://angel-at-chi.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-14.html
Eddi: Interactive Topic-based Browsing of Social Status Streams
Michael S. Bernstein, Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Jilin Chen, Sanjay Kairam, Ed H. Chi
User Interface Software and Technology
This article focuses on some graduate students research into a way to organize the giant haze of messages that are social networks, in this case, a UI to help organize tweets. The group made a dashboard similar to Tweetdeck that organizes tweets into groups based on their topics and in some cases based on their hash tags. The group sees the need for this kind of work but no one had a good way of organizing all these. They found that using a search engine and treating each tweet similar to a search that there was a very easy way to organize them based on their keywords and subject matter. There was no state of art to go off of so this project was built from the ground up with all original ideas. They decided to name their system Eddi and the main component of it was the user interface that was associated with it that helped the user to organize tweets. The system then organizes them into groups for the user to easily navigate. They broke them into about thirty five different topics and the users can add different once based on a keyword or hash tag. The users actually found this system rather enjoyable. While they even mention in the paper that the search engine isn't entirely accurate users found the experience enjoyable and well designed. They said that they key to this is that it combines topics and allows the user to be able to see more than just organization by keywords.
This paper was very interesting but I really cant see myself wanting to pay for something like this. It seems like a service that would be a free add on to my current twitter if I so choose. I also am not liking the idea of twitter as much anymore because of the ways in which it is currently being used. A lot of the people that I have followed have done nothing buy spam advertisements for things and updates telling me to visit a website than the users lifestream. If it would be possible touse the search engine to filter these kinds of tweets out then it would be really nice as well. I also am not sure but their claim that a user can have up to 1000 tweets a day seems rather high. I don't know if twitter is as followed as something like facebook and the extent to which this is used might be limited at best. I think it is a solid idea and if they can get the functionality out of it that they wish it will become a valuable tool. If the search algorithm works well at 40% and helps to break tweets down to combine topics in a meaningful way then I don't see it not being useful and as the algorithm is refined getting better and better.
So it seems to me like this is more to get an idea of what different people think of a certain current event rather than catch up on what your friends have going on in their day. If this is the case it sounds pretty interesting. It sounds a lot better than searching through tons of blogs to find different ones about a certain topic, but rather just search peoples tweets.
ReplyDeleteI guess the logical follow up to Evin's question is whether this is limited to tweets you are specifically following or if it parses the whole internet.
ReplyDelete(Sorry if way off base, know nothing about twitter.)
I also agree that I most likely would not pay for this software. It seems aimed at Twitter "Power Users", who follow hundreds of people, and don't actually use it to keep in touch with people personally, but instead just use it to keep up with the news.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that this is not nearly important enough software for me to actually pay for it. Although to be honest I don't even have a twitter account so getting this software would be very pointless.
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