4 ms·

Show HN: Standing Queries about the World

76 points by tectonic 13y ago

tectonic 13y ago
The project is on GitHub at https://github.com/cantino/huginn https://github.com/cantino/huginn You can also use Huginn to automate many other processes. It's basically an open source IFTTT. I also learned recently that it's being used at the New York Times: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/open-source-bot-factory https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/open-source-bot-f... Here is another article about how to use Huginn to send you weather alerts: http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2014/01/12/never-forget-your-umbrella-again-with-huginn http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2014/01/12/never-forget-y...
tonylemesmer 13y ago
That's cool
- tectonic 13y ago
  Thanks :)
mirsimiki 13y ago
This is a neat idea, getting real time data from a busy place like Twitter is something that rivals current search engines when it comes to get the latest news.
wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
This is great. What's the maximum number of filters for one TwitterStreamAgent? Edit: I mean keywords in a filter.
- tectonic 13y ago
  Thanks. The Twitter Stream API allows you to track 400 keywords at once. https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/7687 https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/7687
jblow 13y ago
It's a neat idea, but by way of honest feedback my eyes started glazing over at "create this agent and that agent", and it became clear I don't want to add this complication to my life. I think this would be vastly more interesting to many more people if the interface were just a line that says: "Tell me when [text field]" and I type something into the text field like "Tesla announces anything." That is all I want to know, so why do you make me do a ton of stuff to implement a query? (Or more basically, why do i need to set this up on my own server? Isn't it way better if it is a service that you just run?)
- tectonic 13y ago
  If I may ask, would you pay for such a service?
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    Combine it with a count of fresh search engine hits and I think you've got an excellent service for PR firms and marketing departments.
    - nathancahill 13y ago
      Google Alerts does this and it's already widely used in PR firms.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - GavinB 13y ago
    Publicity teams would absolutely pay for a "Google Alerts but Way Better" product. You'd need to make it much better and easier to use, and have features similar to the peak tracking so that they can get a sense of how popular a certain word is. They would probably also like to have tweets and blogs from accounts with higher follower counts, pagerank, etc prioritized. So if you get a tweet from an industry leader, you get a text immediately. If you get one from a new account with 4 followers, it gets folded into the daily report as a statistic. Your point of differentiation would be a "secret sauce" of presenting only the most important information to users and not bothering them with all of the irrelevant ones. Publicity teams are generally quite free with the company card, so I'd suggest a freemium offering but with a very limited basic plan. And you don't need to worry about them creating multiple accounts because publicity folks don't have the time or knowhow for that. edit: Drop me a line if you're building something that would work for non-tech savvy publicity folks and need beta users.
compare 13y ago
Like the basic idea. I'm often finding myself hacking together basic alerts on feeds, similar to this.
crawfordcomeaux 13y ago
I've been meaning to get back to hacking on Huginn, but all my time's been focused on another project. I've noticed an increase in activity on the project lately, though, so maybe I should slate some more time for that... How does this compare/contrast with http://bip.io http://bip.io?

76 points by tectonic 13y ago

The project is on GitHub at https://github.com/cantino/huginn https://github.com/cantino/huginn You can also use Huginn to automate many other processes. It's basically an open source IFTTT. I also learned recently that it's being used at the New York Times: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/open-source-bot-factory https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/open-source-bot-f... Here is another article about how to use Huginn to send you weather alerts: http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2014/01/12/never-forget-your-umbrella-again-with-huginn http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2014/01/12/never-forget-y...

tonylemesmer 13y ago

That's cool

tectonic 13y ago
Thanks :)

mirsimiki 13y ago

This is a neat idea, getting real time data from a busy place like Twitter is something that rivals current search engines when it comes to get the latest news.

wrongc0ntinent 13y ago

This is great. What's the maximum number of filters for one TwitterStreamAgent? Edit: I mean keywords in a filter.

tectonic 13y ago
Thanks. The Twitter Stream API allows you to track 400 keywords at once. https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/7687 https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/7687

jblow 13y ago

It's a neat idea, but by way of honest feedback my eyes started glazing over at "create this agent and that agent", and it became clear I don't want to add this complication to my life. I think this would be vastly more interesting to many more people if the interface were just a line that says: "Tell me when [text field]" and I type something into the text field like "Tesla announces anything." That is all I want to know, so why do you make me do a ton of stuff to implement a query? (Or more basically, why do i need to set this up on my own server? Isn't it way better if it is a service that you just run?)

tectonic 13y ago
If I may ask, would you pay for such a service?
- dsr_ 13y ago
  Combine it with a count of fresh search engine hits and I think you've got an excellent service for PR firms and marketing departments.
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    Google Alerts does this and it's already widely used in PR firms.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- GavinB 13y ago
  Publicity teams would absolutely pay for a "Google Alerts but Way Better" product. You'd need to make it much better and easier to use, and have features similar to the peak tracking so that they can get a sense of how popular a certain word is. They would probably also like to have tweets and blogs from accounts with higher follower counts, pagerank, etc prioritized. So if you get a tweet from an industry leader, you get a text immediately. If you get one from a new account with 4 followers, it gets folded into the daily report as a statistic. Your point of differentiation would be a "secret sauce" of presenting only the most important information to users and not bothering them with all of the irrelevant ones. Publicity teams are generally quite free with the company card, so I'd suggest a freemium offering but with a very limited basic plan. And you don't need to worry about them creating multiple accounts because publicity folks don't have the time or knowhow for that. edit: Drop me a line if you're building something that would work for non-tech savvy publicity folks and need beta users.

compare 13y ago

Like the basic idea. I'm often finding myself hacking together basic alerts on feeds, similar to this.

crawfordcomeaux 13y ago

I've been meaning to get back to hacking on Huginn, but all my time's been focused on another project. I've noticed an increase in activity on the project lately, though, so maybe I should slate some more time for that... How does this compare/contrast with http://bip.io http://bip.io?