Almost Real Time

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I talk a good deal about Twitter’s deafeningly absent (but once very present) Track feature because Track was helping to usher in a new paradigm of finding information in a post-google age until the revolutionary functionality was thrown out with the bath water of scalability earlier this year as Twitter sought to sure itself up.

I still have faith and hope that Track will be restored to Twitter (or a similar service with significant uptake… what Identi.ca could have been but never matured into) in some capacity, even if its in a “Pro” package. There’s just too much potential to let the idea and implementation of Track disappear into scalability limbo.

I’m glad to see there are services trying to fill the gap between minutes and hours of latency with RSS with a more real time experience. One of those services is notify.me:

notify.me – About Us: “notify.me delivers notifications that interest you in near real time. It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are pushed to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application. “

I’ve been using the service for the past week. While the response time is dependent on the actual services being observed, it is a good clearing house for info that you need to get sooner than later.

There’s nothing like the real thing, but it’s good to see the drive towards real time discoverability picking up steam with other services.

10 Replies to “Almost Real Time”

  1. Looks promising — I've been casting about for a good mechanism for “redball”-type notifications for some time; have used Rasasa, zaptxt, others and these have all been unreliable in the extreme.

    Reply

  2. Yeah, I've been pretty happy with notify.me for the most part. I also useTwitterSpy and the FriendFeed IM thingy for alerts, but notify seems to getinto my GChat a little quicker so far.

    Reply

  3. It's all configuration.Which items are you talking about getting there sooner? Private messages or track messages? I can add the ability for you to adjust your polling frequency at the cost of blocking out other API consumers (the reason it's ~3 minutes now). If you mix it with another client, it'll just cause them all to stop working periodically, though.gnip may be able to help with some of this (they've really backed down on their offerings for this due to restrictions by twitter), but I'm pretty sure they can't help with messages from people with protected accounts, and certainly wouldn't help with DMs.

    Reply

  4. Have you tried twitterspy? I launched it as an open source project at the beginning of July. It's certainly not nice as my other tracking network (in which twitter refuses to participate), but it's as good as we seem to be able to get from there. As of this comment, I'm currently tracking 2072 terms for 571 users. It does its job.My other network tracking tool delivers ~1-2s latency on any track terms across a few other networks (currently tracking 5,177 terms for 873 users). I tend to not use twitter very much anymore just because of the difficulty in engaging due to such high latency in track.

    Reply

  5. Yep, I've been using (and loving) TwitterSpy since Gillmor etc startedpreaching its gospel. Good stuff and thank you so much for the developmenton that. It is frustrating to put it up against something like IdentiSpywhere you actually see little-to-no latency (normally), so it is a littledepressing.I'm tracking about 20 terms using TwitterSpy and it's much more of a crispand clean experience than Summize etc.Keep up the great work and thanks for stopping by!

    Reply

  6. Looks promising — I've been casting about for a good mechanism for “redball”-type notifications for some time; have used Rasasa, zaptxt, others and these have all been unreliable in the extreme.

    Reply

  7. Yeah, I've been pretty happy with notify.me for the most part. I also use
    TwitterSpy and the FriendFeed IM thingy for alerts, but notify seems to get
    into my GChat a little quicker so far.

    Reply

  8. It's all configuration.

    Which items are you talking about getting there sooner? Private messages or track messages? I can add the ability for you to adjust your polling frequency at the cost of blocking out other API consumers (the reason it's ~3 minutes now). If you mix it with another client, it'll just cause them all to stop working periodically, though.

    gnip may be able to help with some of this (they've really backed down on their offerings for this due to restrictions by twitter), but I'm pretty sure they can't help with messages from people with protected accounts, and certainly wouldn't help with DMs.

    Reply

  9. Have you tried twitterspy? I launched it as an open source project at the beginning of July. It's certainly not nice as my other tracking network (in which twitter refuses to participate), but it's as good as we seem to be able to get from there. As of this comment, I'm currently tracking 2072 terms for 571 users. It does its job.My other network tracking tool delivers ~1-2s latency on any track terms across a few other networks (currently tracking 5,177 terms for 873 users). I tend to not use twitter very much anymore just because of the difficulty in engaging due to such high latency in track.

    Reply

  10. Yep, I've been using (and loving) TwitterSpy since Gillmor etc started
    preaching its gospel. Good stuff and thank you so much for the development
    on that. It is frustrating to put it up against something like IdentiSpy
    where you actually see little-to-no latency (normally), so it is a little
    depressing.

    I'm tracking about 20 terms using TwitterSpy and it's much more of a crisp
    and clean experience than Summize etc.

    Keep up the great work and thanks for stopping by!

    Reply

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