Show HN: Standing Queries about the World | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Standing Queries about the World

blog.andrewcantino.com

76 pointstectonic14 comments

The project is on GitHub at https://github.com/cantino/huginn

You can also use Huginn to automate many other processes. It's basically an open source IFTTT.

I also learned recently that it's being used at the New York Times: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/open-source-bot-f...

Here is another article about how to use Huginn to send you weather alerts: http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2014/01/12/never-forget-y...

It's a neat idea, but by way of honest feedback my eyes started glazing over at "create this agent and that agent", and it became clear I don't want to add this complication to my life.

I think this would be vastly more interesting to many more people if the interface were just a line that says: "Tell me when [text field]" and I type something into the text field like "Tesla announces anything."

That is all I want to know, so why do you make me do a ton of stuff to implement a query? (Or more basically, why do i need to set this up on my own server? Isn't it way better if it is a service that you just run?)

If I may ask, would you pay for such a service?

Combine it with a count of fresh search engine hits and I think you've got an excellent service for PR firms and marketing departments.

Google Alerts does this and it's already widely used in PR firms.

Publicity teams would absolutely pay for a "Google Alerts but Way Better" product. You'd need to make it much better and easier to use, and have features similar to the peak tracking so that they can get a sense of how popular a certain word is.

They would probably also like to have tweets and blogs from accounts with higher follower counts, pagerank, etc prioritized. So if you get a tweet from an industry leader, you get a text immediately. If you get one from a new account with 4 followers, it gets folded into the daily report as a statistic.

Your point of differentiation would be a "secret sauce" of presenting only the most important information to users and not bothering them with all of the irrelevant ones.

Publicity teams are generally quite free with the company card, so I'd suggest a freemium offering but with a very limited basic plan. And you don't need to worry about them creating multiple accounts because publicity folks don't have the time or knowhow for that.

edit: Drop me a line if you're building something that would work for non-tech savvy publicity folks and need beta users.

I would love to give money to IFTTT (especially if they add Webhooks) or Zapier (if they ever make a sensibly priced plan.)

IFTTT is a godsend. Saves me a whole lot of faffing around with writing agents and bots and ...

I've been meaning to get back to hacking on Huginn, but all my time's been focused on another project. I've noticed an increase in activity on the project lately, though, so maybe I should slate some more time for that...

How does this compare/contrast with http://bip.io?

This is a neat idea, getting real time data from a busy place like Twitter is something that rivals current search engines when it comes to get the latest news.

This is great. What's the maximum number of filters for one TwitterStreamAgent?

Edit: I mean keywords in a filter.

Thanks. The Twitter Stream API allows you to track 400 keywords at once. https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/7687

Like the basic idea. I'm often finding myself hacking together basic alerts on feeds, similar to this.

That's cool

Thanks :)

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