Datasift

Fourth DataSift Webinar Video, “Targets”

Did you miss our last Webinar, “Targets? Now you can watch the complete training session here!

Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here

Fourth DataSift Webinar: Targets

The fourth Training Module of DataSift, “Targets”, is scheduled for this Friday 22nd July, 14:00 BST.

DataSift takes data streams from the most popular social media sites. Targets are the individual elements of information these streams offer. There’s almost no limit to the filtering you can perform. Sign up for the webinar and learn to filter by language, follower count, keywords, geographical location.… You can even filter by the sentiment of posts, positive or negative!

Third DataSift Webinar Video, “Operators”

Here you can watch the entire session of our Third Training Module, “Operators”, including a complete guide of all the possible Operators used in DataSift.

** Operators are functions within DataSift that form part of a Stream Definition. The Operator takes the value of the Target from the Input Object, runs its function against it with the specified Argument, and returns a result.

Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here

Funding Announcement

I’m proud today to announce news of our latest round of funding. I’d like to thank everybody at our two new investors, IA Ventures and GRP Partners. This represents a huge vote of confidence and belief in DataSift.

With this funding secured and with two key strategic partners on board, I’m really excited about the momentum we can build around DataSift and the impact we can have in the market.

Well done to the team back in Reading for making it happen!

Nick

P.S. Mark Suster of GRP Partners wrote about the potential for DataSift in Why I’m Doubling Down on the Twitter Ecosystem. Great insight into why we’re all so excited.

Visualising the DataSift Augmented Twitter Firehose

Taking inspiration from DataSift Invaders and some other projects I’ve seen that take technology out of the ether and bring them into the real world e.g. the light painting WiFi project, I decided to take the DataSift augmented Twitter Firehose and experiment with making it more ‘tangible’.

After digging around in my experiments/toy box I found the following bits;

• A TS-7553 embedded ARM SBC (single board computer)
• A Velleman K8055 USB interface board
• Some relays and a cold cathode.

The idea was to connect to the DataSift stream and illuminate a series of LED’s based on a users Klout score, if their score is high enough all LEDs and the cold cathode will light up.

Hooking it all together and writing an interface to DataSift took the better part of a morning but as a proof of concept I think it works quite well;

I’m looking to make something a bit more polished based on the idea and will update as I go @NetworkString

DataSift Space Invaders

What happens when you use the Twitter Firehose to power an arcade game? Well you’d end up with DataSift Invader! It’s a straight forwardsimple looking game that uses various parts of the DataSift platform to create a game that would be incredibly difficult for any other platform to create.

So what parts of the platform are used?

• Sentiment analysis – The Twitter Firehose is sampled and the sentiment of each tweet (on a scale of -20 to 20, the negative number meaning a negative sentiment) is used to move the DataSift ship.
• Social authority – If any user with a Klout or Peerindex score above 75 tweets the DataSift ship will fire a missile
• CSDL – Using various CSDL filters we can find in real-time when a user mentions @DSInvader or #DSInvader, run the sentiment analysis and check the social authority.
• Tagging – Using a single stream we can collect all of this information by using tags for “position”, “shoot” and “user”
• Streaming – The streaming API is used to get the updates in real-time
• NodeJS Consumer – One of our open sourced tools in a DataSift NodeJS Consumer. The whole application is run in NodeJS and therefore using the consumer worked really well.

How do you play?

1. Send a tweet mentioning @DSInvader
2. Wait for barely a second and you will appear as a target for the DataSift ship to shoot
3. You will receive a tweet to let you know if you got past the ship without being hit, or if you were hit by a missile.

HINT: We also run sentiment analysis on all tweets containing @DSInvader, so the more positive you are the faster your avatar will move around the screen, increasing your chances of success!

There will be a more detailed engineering post and we will also be open sourcing the code. So what are you waiting for? Have a go!