Fun with the Broadsight Real Time Search engine

Much to our bemusement, RealTime Search engines are quite the Thing du Jour. You may not know this, dear readers, but we built one 2 years ago as part of a solution to an overall client need* (see a bit of it here).

Anyway, Broadsight Skunkworks have been working round the clock (thats what they tell me, anyway and then they showed me the clock ) to point it at Twitter, and they duly cranked it up and fired it this morning - here are some revelationary findings:

Trending at 8:30 – the key word train – yes you guessed it loads of tweets saying “I am on the train” .... guess that one will have a daily saw tooth pattern then.

Trending H1N1, click on that to see what the story is – most of the tweets returned say “trending story n1h1” – definition of a positive feedback loop

Us engineers say positive feedback loop, economists talk about virtuous cycles, but what this means is that a lot of the "Twitterbuzz" is actually stuff disappearing up its own arse. The reduction in @replies may mitigate this, but retweet is also a big "virus vector".

You literally get out of Twitter what you put into it.....

Anyway, today we are pointing the Memetic Difference Engine at it to parse the wheat from the chavs (hint - twt "kitteh", "lunch" or "awesome" and you are henceforth buried in the slushpile ).

*we built one 2 years ago, and no one was interested in them then. Oh, to always be in front of the mainstream of early adopters