Fluidinfo

July 29, 2010

Top tweeters as followed by HN readers now in FluidDB

Filed under: Programming — Terry Jones @ 5:57 pm

Yesterday Jeff Miller posted some interesting data on the Twitter users most followed by readers of Hacker News.

I just took those top 100 Tweeters and added Jeff’s data (their rank and the fraction of HN readers who follow them) to FluidDB. The tags I used in FluidDB are ycombinator.com/top-100 and ycombinator.com/follow-percent. The top-100 tag has values that are the Twitter user’s rank (from 1 to 100), and the follower-percent tag holds the (floating point) percentage of Hacker News readers that follow that Twitter user, as found by Jeff.

What does this all mean?

It means you can now query on Jeff’s data using FluidDB. And because FluidDB contains various other pieces of information about Twitter users, you can combine his data with other data in searches – including searches that Jeff probably never anticipated (and, because of FluidDB, never had to anticipated).

It also mean you can add to the data too. All you need is a FluidDB account (sign up) and then you can take the FluidDB API for a spin (docs).

To see the kinds of things that are possible, you can also do some queries using the advanced tab of Tickery.

For example, Who are more than 20.0 percent of HN readers following that have a TunkRank score of at least 60?

Or, Who is in the HN top 100 that I have met?

Or, Who of the top 100 do I follow?

The possibilities are endless. The main point of FluidDB is that you can play too. You can add your own data (any data) to the exact same objects that I’ve put Jeff’s data onto and which Tickery and TunkRank and We Met At are all using – and you don’t have to ask permission.

We’ve written plenty more on this subject. See also Tickery, for programmers, TunkRank scores added to FluidDB, Putting metadata onto tweets with FluidDB and FluidDB as a universal metadata engine.

You can get all the code I used to put the data into FluidDB from our hackernews repo on GitHub. It was about 90 minutes of work from start to finish.

Have fun, and please comment below!

July 20, 2010

Open sourcing Tickery

Filed under: Programming — Terry Jones @ 6:23 am

TickeryToday we’re excited to announce that we’ve open sourced Tickery under the Apache License. You can download the source from the Fluidinfo repository on Github. If you’re not familiar with Tickery, you can go play with it and also read our two blog posts, Meet Tickery and Tickery, for programmers.

We’ve open sourced Tickery in order to show other developers the insides of a non-trivial application that uses FluidDB. Tickery was written over a three month period (November 2009 to January 2010), and much of it was done at a fairly fast pace. While the code could be cleaner and better documented, it’s not bad. We’re of course interested to help people understand the code, so please feel free to join the FluidDB users mailing list, or join us in #fluiddb on irc.freenode.net. Naturally we’ll be happy and interested to receive improvements or patches, and you can of course run your own instance of Tickery.

Tickery is written entirely in Python, and was built using a number of other open-source tools, including Twisted, Pyjamas, txFluidDB, txRDQ, txJSON-RPC, and Ply. Thanks to all those projects for their openness and support.

We also had the benefit of lots of help from Luke Leighton and the other Pyjamas developers – thanks!

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