Twitter - list curation as a service? NLP curation?

May 12, 2018 7:34 AM

I follow a lot of people on Twitter (more than two thousand), in a lot of different categories. Right now, I see what everyone is posting either through scrolling through my Twitter timeline, or by looking at Nuzzel to see what people are posting en-masse. However, I feel like I am a late consumer because I don't have true live timeline engagement with the clusters of people I follow. The natural solution to that is to use lists on Twitter. But I follow so many people! Is there a company that would help me create lists of all my followers? Or a tool that could cluster on twitter bios?

Most folks have their spiel in their twitter bio, and I feel like that could be a decent training corpus. I could create these lists myself from scratch, but it would take me a lot of time that I don't have (hours and hours and hours). I just want someone to take a first pass, not a perfect one, and get the clusters defined, and then I can have a system to start with. A lot of people I follow are journalists, a lot of people I follow are in specific tech spaces, a lot of people I follow are institutions, etc. Is there a service that offers this? Have you seen anything on Github that attempts to solve this problem? I am not opposed to signing up for a Twitter API key and hacking on some Python code to get this accomplished. I am also not opposed to paying someone money to do this. Please recommend either technical solutions or consulting services that meet this need. I just don't know where to start. I want better information streams, and I don't want to rely on opaque company controlled algorithms to get them! Help me liberate my hivemind!

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: This paper seems to be a good example of what I'm going for - anyone putting that theory to work? If they're selling, I'm buying! And if they aren't selling, I'm compiling!
posted by Anonymous at 7:52 AM on May 12, 2018

As you say, this is what lists are for. Easiest thing would be to post on MeFi Jobs for someone to go through all the people you follow and add them to lists. Either lists suggested by you, or that they suggest, having examined who you follow. If you're inclined to keep adding new people, you can then either add them to existing lists each time you follow someone new, or pay someone to spend an hour a month (or whatever) tidying up.
posted by penguin pie at 8:20 AM on May 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: MeFi jobs is a great suggestion. Thanks, penguin pie! I will keep that in mind as a potential option.
posted by Anonymous at 8:22 AM on May 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

I would also like this thing, so am following with interest. I've been poking around and there used to be a free tool SocialBro that you could use along with Excel (as outlined here). That tool is now called Audiesense which has a free two week trial and I'm not sure if it does the same thing.
posted by jessamyn at 12:53 PM on May 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

A suggestion if you wind up trying to do it yourself - the list memberships attribute of the accounts you follow might be more useful than their bios. Basically look at the names of the lists to which other people have assigned your follows - the journalists will be on a bunch of lists called 'journalists,' 'news,' etc. You can get this data via the API. Do some counting and clustering within and between users and I think you could get to a decent first grouping. I might try to fiddle around with an approach in R if I can find some time.
posted by yarrow at 4:51 AM on May 15, 2018 [1 favorite]