Twitter support for messaging module

[Shishir Kakaraddi]

Hello,

        I am working on adding twitter support to the messaging module. I am not sure how the user who is sending the messages through the system should ensure that tweets are going through his twitter account. Should we provide the user to authenticate himself on twitter and then provide sahana-eden the permissions to send and receive tweets on his behalf? or Should we have a common account for sahana-eden so that whenever user sends a tweet it will be sent from this common account and not his personal account?

I hope I made myself clear

Thanks

Shishir Kakaraddi

[Abhishek Mishra]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 6:06 AM, Shishir Kakaraddi <shishirk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

        I am working on adding twitter support to the messaging module. I am not sure how the user who is sending the messages through the system should ensure that tweets are going through his twitter account. Should we provide the user to authenticate himself on twitter and then provide sahana-eden the permissions to send and receive tweets on his behalf? or Should we have a common account for sahana-eden so that whenever user sends a tweet it will be sent from this common account and not his personal account?

A common account -

Pros - quick, no auth redirects required

Cons - twitter API rate limits, the sender info too has to be attached within 140 characters.

Using OAuth - one time access grant, one needs a twitter account.

Is anyone also thinking of adding some sort of twitter-monitor or twitter analytics - though a lot of noise comes in even if you monitor specific hash tags, and not all are geo tagged.

Abhishek

[Fran Boon]

On 15 October 2010 01:57, Abhishek Mishra <idea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 6:06 AM, Shishir Kakaraddi
> <shishirk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>         I am working on adding twitter support to the messaging module. I
>> am not sure how the user who is sending the messages through the system
>> should ensure that tweets are going through his twitter account. Should we
>> provide the user to authenticate himself on twitter and then provide
>> sahana-eden the permissions to send and receive tweets on his behalf?
>> or Should we have a common account for sahana-eden so that whenever user
>> sends a tweet it will be sent from this common account and not his personal
>> account?

I was thinking of a common account.
We're not using Sahana as a personal Twitter client, but rather when
we're sending out subscription updates we can send them to users based
on their personal subscription option & when we're sending out alerts,
they would be tagged as being from the Sahana instance.

> A common account -
> Pros - quick, no auth redirects required
> Cons - twitter API rate limits, the sender info too has to be attached
> within 140 characters.

> Using OAuth - one time access grant, one needs a twitter account.

Can't we use a common account via OAuth?

> Is anyone also thinking of adding some sort of twitter-monitor or twitter
> analytics - though a lot of noise comes in even if you monitor specific hash
> tags, and not all are geo tagged.

There are indeed many concerns as to the noise levels, but filtering
can definitely help & will only get better...an area for the more
advanced research once the basic infrastructure is in-place.
I know that at least thedod is interested in this...

F

[Abhishek Mishra]

> Using OAuth - one time access grant, one needs a twitter account.

Can't we use a common account via OAuth?

Rephrase - "Using OAuth" -> "Using their account"

Yup, in both cases we should be using OAuth, twitter has discarded the classic API by now.

 

[shishirmk]

Yes and it is possible to use Oauth in any case. Advantage with a
sahana common account is that we need not authenticate through oauth
always. If you have the access_tokens and the request_tokens its
enoough. So its a one time affair

But if you want it done for personal accounts then we have to give a
link to the user so that he can authenticate sahana, to use his
account. This should be atleast done for each user once. If multiple
installations are there then for each installation too.

[Fran Boon]

On 15 October 2010 15:57, shishirmk <shishirk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes and it is possible to use Oauth in any case. Advantage with a
> sahana common account is that we need not authenticate through oauth
> always. If you have the access_tokens and the request_tokens its
> enoough. So its a one time affair

Great :)

> But if you want it done for personal accounts then we have to give a
> link to the user so that he can authenticate sahana, to use his
> account. This should be atleast done for each user once. If multiple
> installations are there then for each installation too.

I don't think we need Personal accounts.

Once the basics are in-place, it would however be good to extend this
to being able to have a different Twitter account used per
Organisation & then, potentially, by Team.

So bearing this in mind for future extension would be good.
However delivering the basic common account would be a good start :)

F

> On Oct 15, 2:37 am, Abhishek Mishra <ideam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > > Using OAuth - one time access grant, one needs a twitter account.
>>
>> > Can't we use a common account via OAuth?
>>
>> Rephrase - "Using OAuth" -> "Using their account"
>>
>> Yup, in both cases we should be using OAuth, twitter has discarded the
>> classic API by now.
>

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[Tim McNamara]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Fran Boon <franc...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 15 October 2010 01:57, Abhishek Mishra <idea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 6:06 AM, Shishir Kakaraddi
> <shishirk...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>         I am working on adding twitter support to the messaging module. I
>> am not sure how the user who is sending the messages through the system
>> should ensure that tweets are going through his twitter account. Should we
>> provide the user to authenticate himself on twitter and then provide
>> sahana-eden the permissions to send and receive tweets on his behalf?
>> or Should we have a common account for sahana-eden so that whenever user
>> sends a tweet it will be sent from this common account and not his personal
>> account?

I was thinking of a common account.
We're not using Sahana as a personal Twitter client, but rather when
we're sending out subscription updates we can send them to users based
on their personal subscription option & when we're sending out alerts,
they would be tagged as being from the Sahana instance.

I registered "sahana_alerts" several months ago..

[Gavin Treadgold]

Very keen to seen a monitoring tool developed. E.g. following the recent earthquake here in Christchurch, it would have been great to:

* store tweets from 1 or more hastags e.g. #eqnz #canterburyquake to build up a local repo of all relevant tweets
* be able to reply/retweet to these messages e.g. provide an official response
* provide analytics on things like - who are the most active users and retweeters e.g. which to target for sending out messages and who is most likely to retweet
* if possible try and cluster similar/identical tweets to reduce the amount of noise - making it faster and simpler to monitor what is going on. As well as automatic clustering, it would be nice to provide users the ability to manually drag a tweet to an existing cluster so that it is removed from the master timeline (so as to simplify the timeline viewed by the user)
* be able to link tickets/actions to specific tweet
* it should be possible to automatically load a hashtag that is included in all outgoing messages e.g. we would have setup #eqnz to be included in all outgoing tweets. this may change during the event e.g. the Ministry of Civil Defence Emergency Management started with #CanterburyQuake but this was soon shortened and overtaken by #eqnz as being shorter and more useable.

We would probably have some people from Project EPIC that would be interested in seeing some of their research in this area operationalised.

Cheers Gav
(who is way behind on his email ;) )

[Tim McNamara]

I spent a bit of time on the wee (e.g.kend using Twitter's streaming API. This creates a persistent HTTP connection between the application and the . It's incredibly easy to filter to tweets. Twitter does it all for you, you just give a comma delimited lists. I'll try to get it running online so that people can have a play shortly.

Tangent: Twitter actually provides the "firehose" method, that gives applications access to every single public tweet (!!). Clustering / classifying these to identify, probably through supervised machine learning, will be fairly bandwidth, storage computationally heavy.  I wonder whether the wider humanitarian FOSS community could support funds for some bandwidth and processing to support that kind of research activity.

One of the tools that could be used is OpenCog[1] (open cognition), a C++ mega-application that can be made to .  Otherwise we could manually generate tools with the NLTK.

Another is OpenCalais, software that is really good at extracting named entities & subjects from text. I don't know how well it will deal with tweets though. It's also not free to use.

Should I keep going? I know a little bit about natural language processing, but am vary of generating a massive email!

Tim

[1] http://www.opencog.org/

[2] http://www.opencalais.com/