Hacker News Reader

Comment by evdawg | Hacker News Reader

That page is faked; I just see the same entries come up again and again after I refresh.

Brilliant marketing technique, indeed.

They aren't fake entries. If you click on the actual entry you can click "View on Twitter" and it goes to the actual tweet that said it.

They're probably just caching the tweets and updating them every so often.

They might be real entries, that doens't mean they're randomly chosen. MS probably selected a bunch that made them look good, and then threw in a few that were somewhat neutral to make it look fair (I'm thinking the downloading, what are the new features one)...

I believe they're just marking tweets as favorites, then pulling only those:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-favorite...

I think they rotate and repeat them but they might still be real entries.

http://twitter.com/yogi4change/status/5108003634

http://twitter.com/NewChannelMedia/status/5071269000

here are a random couple I tracked down by handle (some I tried to track down, but couldn't find). from the current moment, they are 7 and 22 hours old.

You click the message and it gives you details, including "view on twitter". The one I checked was 20 hours old but seemed to be part of a genuine stream unless they went to the trouble of creating a back-catalogue of tweets in order to astro-tweet (!).

I think it's more interesting than that. they obviously picked the tweets as those search streams have all sorts of junk in them. so, they had to pluck out tweets that sounded twitter-ish, but not too twitter-ish. not sure if this was done by humans or robots.

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