ResearchBuzz

It’s not as nifty as a cell phone, or as amazing as street views of businesses all over the world, but to me it is big news — really big news. Google announced yesterday
that Google Reader can now be used to monitor pages for Web changes — whether they have RSS feeds or not.

Ten years after I started using RSS, it’s pretty prevalent but not universal. Google’s announcement means it’s going to be a lot easier to follow those random pages that don’t have RSS feeds for update information.

Are you already using the Google Reader for RSS feeds? Adding non-RSS content is easy. Just click on the “Add a Subscription” button and you’ll get a form into which you can paste an RSS feed URL or a regular HTML page URL. Google will ask you to confirm that you would like to create a feed to monitor based on that page.

Now, HTML pages are not RSS feeds. Their information is harder to isolate and delineate. So while the idea is that Google is going to “provide short snippets of page changes,” it’s not clear what those snippets are going to look like. Is going going to get hung up on a date change or counter change? (This has been a problem in the past with software like WebSite Watcher.) Are the snippets going to be meaningful?

I’ve added some pages to Google Reader and will revisit them in a week or so to see what kind of snippets I’m getting as results.

I have actually been using ListiMonkey for a few weeks, ever since I heard about it from Steve Rubel. First I loved it, then I hated it. After several e-mail conversations with the developers and some tweaks they’ve made to the tool I love it again. If you’re at all interested in trapping information via Twitter, I think you’ll love it too.

Have you ever tried to monitor Twitter via its search-results-as-RSS-feeds? It’s tough. For the kinds of keywords I’ve tried to use, I got a lot of spam. It got so I couldn’t use the feeds; they were too spammy.

Enter ListiMonkey at http://listimonkey.com/. ListiMonkey allows you to specify a Twitter list, enter the keywords for which you want to monitor that list, and then specify an e-mail address to which you want to get the results, and how often you want to get the results (hourly or daily). (It’s possible to follow a list and get the all tweets generated by not specifying any keywords, but I don’t recommend that — you’ll get lots of e-mail with lots of tweets unless you choose your lists very very carefully.) That’s it. There’s no registration involved. You WILL have to confirm your e-mail for each alert, of course.

Now, if you monitor a Twitter list, you’re obviously not getting as much as you’d get if you were monitoring the entire Twitter stream. On the other hand, if someone gets added to a Twitter list it’s because someone ELSE thinks they post stuff that’s worth reading. And you’ll cut down the spam level to almost nothing. You’re getting useful results, in other words.

ListiMonkey does have about 250 Twitter lists available, but I think you’ll have more luck finding lists using the TweetDeck Directory at http://tweetdeck.com/#directory. Once you’ve found a list you want to follow, the obvious next question is what kind of keywords do you want to monitor?

This is what was tough for me in figuring out how to use ListiMonkey, and it’s one thing that’s changed a lot thanks to the developers. I found a couple of lists where I just wanted to find out what kind of links people were putting out there. I didn’t necessarily want tweets without links. So my first keyword monitor on ListiMonkey was just http.

Naturally this found all tweets that had a URL in them, and none without. But it also found retweets, checkins using FourSquare/Gowalla, pictures people were posting, etc. I didn’t want any of that. (And making sure I didn’t get that was important, for two reasons: one I didn’t want to get drowned in e-mail alerts and two, ListiMonkey limits its monitors to 100/tweets per mail. If I didn’t filter as closely as I could I would miss stuff.)

Initially ListiMonkey did not allow me to do complex queries like that, where I specified one keyword that I was looking for and a bunch of keywords that I weren’t. But that has been added in. So I did a lot of experiments where I looked for links to resources but not to anything extraneous, and ended up with a ListiMonkey query with several keywords:

http -4sq -gowal -rt -twitpic

That gets me e-mails from ListiMonkey that are full of resource-y link goodness.

When you get an e-mail from ListiMonkey, it’ll look like this:

You’ll get the tweet, of course, with the author and avatar, timestamp, and option to retweet or reply to the tweet (of course you’ll have to be logged in to your Twitter account to do that.) The e-mail also has links to edit your alert or delete your alert if it’s not working out for you.

One thing you should know: ListiMonkey is tracking the clicks on the links in its e-mail. You might think you’re clicking on a bit.ly link when actually you’re clicking on http://listimonkey.com/link/track?alert_id=1378&url=http://bit.ly/5gGhqm . Just a heads-up if you’re concerned about link tracking (I’m not.) If it really bothers you, you can always highlight the link in the tweet and then copy/paste it to your browser.

You can learn more about ListiMonkey via its FAQ. ListiMonkey was a small shop project, and while there’s no charge for the service the developer is accepting donations. I think they’ve put together a great tool here; if you agree with me how about slipping them a few bucks via the Donate tool on the FAQ page?

Do you need to do some serious information trapping on Twitter? Got some keywords you want to monitor and you don’t want to miss a thing? Check out this nifty application I heard about from Ed — RowFeeder. (Thanks Ed!) RowFeeder’s not cheap, but if you want to quickly gather materials from a Twitter flow and get them in a format that you can easily manipulate, it looks like a heck of a tool.

RowFeeder’s at http://rowfeeder.com/. Here’s how it works: you specify a term or hashtag you want to track. Then you pay — well, you’re supposed to pay but the pay button didn’t work when I tried it; instead I got an e-mail address to contact for making payments. This is where the ain’t cheap part comes in — it’s $2.49 to monitor a term/tag for up to 48 hours. (This would very quickly make me very broke.)

RowFeeder monitors the tweetstream and fetches tweets that match your tags, using them to populate a Google Spreadsheet like the one you see in the screenshot. Information is broken out into columns including username, Tweet, homepage, location, and date.

This is too expensive for me to use on a regular basis but I can easily see how a PR firm or company who wants to track comments about a release could get a lot of use out of RowFeeder. I’d have a little concern about monitoring the entire tweetstream — there’s a lot of spam out there. It’d be nice to monitor just specified lists.

Cool Tool!