Filtering Twitter Noise
The problem, and some solutions using
TalkingPuffin and Scala.
Dave Briccetti
@dcbriccetti

What is Twitter noise?

How can I mute everything from Foursquare?

Nothing more from Foursquare.
If we wanted, we could just exclude Foursquare
tweets from individual users.

What about noisy retweeters?

No more retweets from this user. This leaves her
original, primary tweets, which we value.

How does TalkingPuffin store these filters?
Let’s look at the filters dialog.

These are “compound filters.”

Contains a List of these:

Tags

Tags may be assigned to people, and tweets may
be included or excluded by tags.
Tags can be exported to Twitter lists.

Here we just want to look at Twitter employees.

Tags are managed by a TagUsers object.

CompoundFilters and tags are stored in
InOutFilters.

InOutFilters are stored in a FilterSet, along with
some general, boolean options.

Detecting retweets with regular expressions

External Noise Filters
A shared repository of regular expressions or
other filters that can be used in a community to
identify and filter out noise.

General Filters Pane

Delivered Via a Web Service on
Google App Engine

Loaded into a List of regular
expressions

And used to find noise tweets

Summary
● There is a lot of noise on Twitter
● With the right tools you can control it
● TalkingPuffin is one such tool
● Scala is a great language for creating such
tools

More
● Learn more about
● TalkingPuffin at TalkingPuffin.org
● Scala at scala-lang.org
● Consider joining the TalkingPuffin open source
development effort
● Contact
● Dave Briccetti, @dcbriccetti