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1) Understandable; and I'm learning through feedback from the comments :) Let's see if I understand you. The response will be whatever you specify it to be. @c

by jayliew 16y ago

1) Understandable; and I'm learning through feedback from the comments :) Let's see if I understand you. The response will be whatever you specify it to be. @cmercier said "@jaysern hi !!!" to me http://twitter.com/cmercier/status/13104066344 http://twitter.com/cmercier/status/13104066344 and in response, my Twitter account responded automatically with "@cmercier hey there!" (I had specified that it should auto-respond to with exactly that response): http://twitter.com/jaysern/status/13104120410 http://twitter.com/jaysern/status/13104120410 2) I apologize for the confusion. RSR scans the tweets from 3 sources: from people you are following, tweets that have @mention'd you, and tweets from public_timeline; if something matches from those 3 sources, it will respond. Whether the person is a stranger or not. What I was explaining in [2], I now realize I didn't explain well.. is that the system does not explicitly search for keywords to respond to, outside of the 3 cases I mentioned above. Let's say 'blah' is a rare word. If you set a 'filter' (as you call it) to respond to a tweet containing 'blah', it will only respond only if that tweet was seen from those 3 places. In other words, if there's a person X who tweets "blah", but you're not following him, X does not @mention you, and X's tweet does not show in public_timeline, then there will not be an auto-response. (let me know if that is still confusing). 3) Yes, it's at http://www.rapidsocialresponse.com/user/your_username_here http://www.rapidsocialresponse.com/user/your_username_here - but that's good feedback for me to know (that users prefer that it not be displayed) 4) I didn't add a 'count', but I can do that from the back end so that users know exactly which entry auto-responded the most, and which didn't, and so forth. I can certainly understand it comes off spammy, but would like to know the reasoning behind that, if you care to share more. It's definitely ripe for abuse .. which is something I will have to pay attention to. I appreciate the feedback, quorge!

qeorge 16y ago
Hey Jay, thanks for your detailed response. 1) The problem is this: If I set up a new "filter", I have to wait until someone triggers it to see what my response will look like. In my case, that could be days or weeks. So it would be great to preview this in some way - ideally, it would scan the timeline and show what I would have responded to, were the filter already engaged. Does that make any sense? 2) public_timeline is the same pool as search.twitter.com, right? I'm interested in Twitter's policy here, as I could see them disapproving of my sending messages to strangers in response to keywords. OTOH, I see people do this all the time, so maybe its a non-issue. 3) Thanks. That would be a great feature. I know my tweets are public anyway, but I'd like to avoid displaying that I am using an automated service. 4) A count would be great, maybe even rate limiting per response (e.g., don't send this message more than once per hour). Regarding spamminess, I definitely agree that its all about usage. For instance, if someone mentions my brand, I don't think an auto-response is spammy at all. If I'm scanning for anyone mentioning DVDs so I can push my affiliate link, that's entirely different. For my brand specifically, my concern would be that the responses were so generic that they would come across as spammy. Basically, I'm nervous about automating any part of my communications with my customers. Note: even though this might not be a fit for my small business, simply because we don't have that much twitter volume, I think it would be really useful to many others. There is a definite need for this product.
- jayliew 16y ago
  1) that makes perfect sense. Basically like a dry-run test when you're crafting the filter. It'd take more dev time to implement that, I just wanted to get a bare bones out, but I'm taking notes :) 2) From what I understand, search.twitter.com, well they have their own special secret-sauce-laced algorithm; and outside looking in I don't know how they relate, but from what I've tested, it's different. public_timeline is a very small subset of the total tweets in the world. Basically, every 60 seconds they give you a snapshot of 20 tweets, randomly picked from the Twitter universe. With search.twitter.com, you're searching for something specific (public timeline is 100% random) 3) Good to know, noted. 4) I thought about a rate limiter, but to need a rate limiter, you've either (a) entered a filter that is overly generic (since it's matching over aggressively) -or- (b) you genuinely are seeing that many tweets with a similar pattern that matches the filter. In the case of (a), you'd have to make your filter less aggressive. In the case of (b), then you must be a "power" power user. A made-up example would be if you were @starbucks and hundreds of Starbucks fans would each day ask you "did you change the frappucino light formula?" http://twitter.com/ShesShoppingNow/status/12914278780 http://twitter.com/ShesShoppingNow/status/12914278780 - which if that was indeed the case, that is the perfect use case ;) You'd be auto-answering a question that gets repeated to you over and over and over ... In social media, it's all about honesty/transparency/genuine-"ness", so yeah .. definitely craft the response to be as genuine as possible (its your choice to make it not generic sounding), but then yeah, if people see you repeat the same exact words over and over, they might suspect you automated it. I guess then I will throw in a "randomizer" to include a slight variation in the response ;) And on the last point, I was thinking the same .. the percentage of people who might find this useful is probably not the bulk of Tweet-izens :/ But it was a fun exercise for me, and I thought I'd put it out there for the world and see if anyone cares!

by jayliew 16y ago

qeorge 16y ago

Hey Jay, thanks for your detailed response. 1) The problem is this: If I set up a new "filter", I have to wait until someone triggers it to see what my response will look like. In my case, that could be days or weeks. So it would be great to preview this in some way - ideally, it would scan the timeline and show what I would have responded to, were the filter already engaged. Does that make any sense? 2) public_timeline is the same pool as search.twitter.com, right? I'm interested in Twitter's policy here, as I could see them disapproving of my sending messages to strangers in response to keywords. OTOH, I see people do this all the time, so maybe its a non-issue. 3) Thanks. That would be a great feature. I know my tweets are public anyway, but I'd like to avoid displaying that I am using an automated service. 4) A count would be great, maybe even rate limiting per response (e.g., don't send this message more than once per hour). Regarding spamminess, I definitely agree that its all about usage. For instance, if someone mentions my brand, I don't think an auto-response is spammy at all. If I'm scanning for anyone mentioning DVDs so I can push my affiliate link, that's entirely different. For my brand specifically, my concern would be that the responses were so generic that they would come across as spammy. Basically, I'm nervous about automating any part of my communications with my customers. Note: even though this might not be a fit for my small business, simply because we don't have that much twitter volume, I think it would be really useful to many others. There is a definite need for this product.

jayliew 16y ago
1) that makes perfect sense. Basically like a dry-run test when you're crafting the filter. It'd take more dev time to implement that, I just wanted to get a bare bones out, but I'm taking notes :) 2) From what I understand, search.twitter.com, well they have their own special secret-sauce-laced algorithm; and outside looking in I don't know how they relate, but from what I've tested, it's different. public_timeline is a very small subset of the total tweets in the world. Basically, every 60 seconds they give you a snapshot of 20 tweets, randomly picked from the Twitter universe. With search.twitter.com, you're searching for something specific (public timeline is 100% random) 3) Good to know, noted. 4) I thought about a rate limiter, but to need a rate limiter, you've either (a) entered a filter that is overly generic (since it's matching over aggressively) -or- (b) you genuinely are seeing that many tweets with a similar pattern that matches the filter. In the case of (a), you'd have to make your filter less aggressive. In the case of (b), then you must be a "power" power user. A made-up example would be if you were @starbucks and hundreds of Starbucks fans would each day ask you "did you change the frappucino light formula?" http://twitter.com/ShesShoppingNow/status/12914278780 http://twitter.com/ShesShoppingNow/status/12914278780 - which if that was indeed the case, that is the perfect use case ;) You'd be auto-answering a question that gets repeated to you over and over and over ... In social media, it's all about honesty/transparency/genuine-"ness", so yeah .. definitely craft the response to be as genuine as possible (its your choice to make it not generic sounding), but then yeah, if people see you repeat the same exact words over and over, they might suspect you automated it. I guess then I will throw in a "randomizer" to include a slight variation in the response ;) And on the last point, I was thinking the same .. the percentage of people who might find this useful is probably not the bulk of Tweet-izens :/ But it was a fun exercise for me, and I thought I'd put it out there for the world and see if anyone cares!