Show HN: Tweets about TV Shows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tweets about TV Shows

tvchatapp.com

5 pointswushupork14 comments

Your alphabetization skills need improvement. For example: "The Apprentice" should be under "A," not "T." Similarly for any shows that begin with "A" "An" or "The."

Am I correct that you're pulling them in by hashtag? So any without the proper hashtag will be missed?

Very nice layout, tho. Clean.

And anything using the same hashtag for other purposes (see House) is polluted. We ran into the same problem classifying comedy shows and eventually wrote a multi-tier relevancy matcher based on the hashtag, key indicators, sentiment and time. A nice problem to chew on if you're so inclined.

OMG. A generic hashtag like House must be a nightmare. Good thing you're not doing Canadian TV shows too. There's a cop show just called "King." I ranted in a post about how search engine-hostile that title was.

To derail slightly, some of the comedy shows we ended up dealing with were "Party", "Hotel" and "Free". We didn't require that people used a specific hashtag for each show name (our audience wasn't savvy enough), but we wanted to make sure there were more indicators than just the name.

Some included the hashtag for the comedy festival itself (easy), key performer names, temporal or location cues and relevant other words that were strong indicators for the comedy show rather than its other meaning - I curated a list. The same approach'd work here.

Why are TV shows so badly named, though, that's the real question? Is it the drive towards simplicity I'm starting to see in a few different places? Or is it "grittier" if it's a show named after just a surname?

>>>Why are TV shows so badly named, though, that's the real question?

TV marketers are not Internet savvy. If I can intrude with a post URL, at least the Oxygen Network understands and assigns hashtags in its ads:

http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/oxygen-channel-lov...

If only all the other TV shows did that!

yes it does require the right hashtag. but we use multiple for a given show. For instance, american idol is a twitter search for "American Idol" OR #idol OR #AmericanIdol. it seemed like figuring out the best search string for each show took more time then building the app.

Looks cool, but there's no search box, you've got to have this, i.e. I want to see the tweets for True Blood. Also, when I click on a show, the Cats&Crew overlay doesn't display anything and cannot be closed (Firefox 3.6)

1. listing the hulu shows is sort of pointless for mobile. most phones don't support flash, and I think Hulu blocks shows anyways and tells you to get hulu +. I could be wrong on the hulu thing.

2. Should be a way to retrieve additional tweets outside of your initial list for each show when reaching the bottom. I do see a button randomly appear at the top of the list that tells me new tweets are available, but I'm not even sure it does anything.

I am viewing it on chrome so maybe somethings may work differently ?

on #2 the button at the top for new tweets, let's you control when to refresh the list (click on it). Otherwise shows like american idol have so much traffic you can't read the stream.

Thanks. The search box is a good idea (can't believe I forgot to add it). As for other channels/shows I will be adding more, I just wanted to get it out there and start getting feedback

The problem is that you're relying on users of twitter to specify the correct hashtag, which will significantly decrease your SNR. You should collect entity information on the actors and characters the show is about and do some intelligent associations to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

Otherwise, great job on sucking down some tweets and parsing hashtags into verticals. I also think the design is simple and clean. What's the tech stack?

Thanks.. cast and crew are on my short list to add, so you can just watch the stream of tweets from the cast. And not all of the random public tweets too..

The tech stack is a little SpringMVC, JQuery Mobile, mysql

My friend Mike recently created this app and would love feedback:

http://tvchatapp.com/mobile/

It's a way to connect with people who have common viewing interests with you and view Twitter chatter about those TV shows.

I've used this for two minutes now and have no idea what it is. Is it Tweets for shows? How is it different from me just searching for the show's name?

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