Take your friending topics with you

You can now take your friending topics with you anywhere.

Well, anywhere that lets you consume an RSS feed – like the sidebar of your blog or your feed reader. Topics and #tags are now available in handy RSS format for when you don’t have friendingtopics.com open.

Just click the appropriate orange rss icon to grab your feed. The content of these feeds is experimental so let us now what you want from them. Do you want to be a single click to take you to your friendingtopics dashboard, to a twitter search, to a custom location? Do you want an hourly update rather than a daily? Do you only want to see an update when something changes in the top 10?

Let me know @friendingtopics.

This is just the first of our services to let you take your topics lists with you – if you’d love a specific solution let us know, it might even bump it up our roadmap.

If you’re puzzled by what an RSS feed is then just ignore this post – we’ll be back with more ‘click and go’ ways to move your friending topics around soon.

Should ‘tonight’ trend?

Friending Topics pumps out lists of trending topics, trending hashtags, and trending people from your network. Simple.

We omit certain words and phrases because we think they are noise. It’s mainly obvious stuff like ‘this‘, ‘that‘, etc… as well as a few more sophisticated things around patterns that we see as ‘spammy’. This works pretty well to clean up the random stuff – allowing the real deal to come to the top.

Some feedback has suggested we should also filter out time references like ‘today‘, ‘tonight‘ and ‘tomorrow‘ because these trend for people quite regularly.

So I wanted to explain why we kept them in there, and how we are dealing with this issue to let you get rid of them if they bug you.

Why we keep “tonight”

On my timeline there is an occassional burst of talk about ‘lunch’ or ‘friday pint’ or something happening ‘tonight’.

If I see ‘tonight’ is trending I simply hover it and see what’s happening tonight. It might just be a bunch of babble from people saying “I’m staying in tonight” or “I’ll be working late tonight” but quite often it’s because a TV show, gig, or event is on tonight. That being the case I want to know about it.

In an ideal world we’ll be able to pick out what that event is – turning “new attenborough tonight”, “watch life tonight”, “turtles on life bbc1 tonight” into a link to the show online. That’s for Version 2! For now we think it’s useful to know that everyone is talking about tonight and to get those tweets in a nice little package.

“But I really want to get rid of it”

If you still aren’t convinced – we’re working on a couple of features which allow you to boost / drop certain words and phrases in your lists. So if you don’t want to know about “tonight” just drop it. If you really want to know if “movie” trends even a little, give it a boost.

Watch the twitter feed @friendingtopics to see when that goes live.

Until then, just breath deep and don’t let it bug you safe in the knowledge that we’re working on it!

status update

Some oddness in the stream clashed with some of our processing over the past few hours – leading  a few users to see timelines cluttered with unusual (read error) messages.

This has been resolved, a couple of new layers of pre-checking are in place, and all should now be well. Let me know if you still see anything odd.

New look

Our new look went live today – featuring the new logo, and a new lighter layout on the dashboard.

I’ve put more details about how the logo came about through 99designs in a new post over on my blog.

The new layout shown below gives a much clearer space for your tweets, and more flexibility for some of the new features to be added over the coming weeks. These updates will center on allowing you to extract your friending topics and use them elsewhere – like in your blog sidebar. If you have a space you’d love to fill with your friending topics let us know about it.

Some new features

Over the past few days we’ve had some really useful feedback and requests from users of friendingtopics – a big thankyou to everyone who’s taken the time to say hello.

I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few changes to the site that went live today.

• Avatars replace the username lists for active members of your network making the page more concise and a sight prettier too.
• Some additional checks are being made to minimise cross over of hashtags into the Topics list.
• It’s also now a lot easier to see those tweeps that your network are talking about / RTing and hop over to twitter to check their full profile.

Logo Design Contest

Friending Topics needs a new logo, so we’re holding a contest over at 99 Designs to design one. Here’s the link:

http://99designs.com/contests/29053

Why brief one designer when you can brief around fifty thousand!

Contest closes in about a week – at which point the new logo will go live.

Why no topics?

Our first FAQ – “Why did my topics list disappear / shrink?”

This one is simple. Friending Topics looks at recent tweets from people you follow and looks for patterns – if it finds none, it reports none – if it finds lots it reports lots.

Now the question is what do we mean by ‘recently’? We’re testing this at the moment – the challenge is that some people see two tweets an hour, some 2,000. Until we get a feel for the flow of your particular twitter timeline we’ll over/under estimate what ‘recently’ means for you and might produce an over long or over short topics list.

Hopefully we’re pretty close for most users.

As we scale up we are also artificially limiting the number of tweets we consider when calculating the reports. This may affect the reports for people following high numbers of accounts. If you think that might be happening to you and want the limit lifted tweet me and I’ll check what’s going on.

First screenshot

Pre-pre-preview screenshot

Nothing in the screenshot above is guaranteed to appear as-is in the released version of friending topics, but this is a useful hook for any discussion or references I make in discussing the functions as we polish them.

Basically you hover / click on stuff in the blue panels to make the tweets shown in the white panel to the right change. Hover on ‘twitter’ and only tweets mentioning twitter will be displayed. Click the image for a zoomed in view.

Tweet me if you’d like to join the test users in playing with the site.

Good morning

FriendingTopics has a simple objective – to allow you to see an overview of activity on twitter when you don’t have time to read 200 tweets an hour.

Taking the idea behind trending topics and applying it to your network, we produce a new view on recent tweets which highlights active topics, hashtags, and users – all in a sing page load interactive tweetstack.

We’re in private testing right now, but if you’d like to help with testing just tweet @stevenmilne or @friendingtopics and we’ll send you a link. Follow @friendingtopics to find out when we start letting everyone in.