The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead

16 Sep 2008

twitter_logo.jpg (JPEG Image, 800x295 pixels)

I’ve been away from Twitter for about 4 months as I’ve stated in previous posts. Many of you know my frustrations regarding Twitter’s smoke & mirrors routine when it comes to uptime and availability. Most of this angst was driven by my lust for Twitter’s absent Track feature. Last week at bearhug camp, the guys at Twitter were interviewed by Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer regarding various hot topics such as Track. Leo Laporte was kind enough to stream the entire event live. While I didn’t learn anything new from their (Twitter’s) responses, I did finally come to one important realization:

TWiT Live - Live Netcasts from TWiT with Leo Laporte and Friends-1.jpg

Track is not coming back.

At least, not in the form that I previously loved. I loved that I had access to a ginormous global chat room and I had the ability to filter it for terms that I cared about. The potency of information I received was unparalleled. It was fast, real-time, and personal. Those days are gone and I’ve accepted it. The stable Twitter that everyone loves today is not the same one of the past. Many people are content with it and are happy with a web based term searching feature called Twitter Search. For me, it’s not the same, but I have to let it go and move on.

Track/XMPP has proven to be a technological hurdle as our friends at identi.ca are learning. It’s a beast. They haven’t been able to keep their implementation going consistently with just a small fraction of what Twitter has to deal with. My issue up until this moment was that I didn’t want to believe that Twitter’s “firehose” of information for everyone was too much for any current implementation to handle. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.™

In short, I’ve tasted Track and it was so delicious, the flavor still lingers on my tongue, but I’ve got to let it go.

So, by letting go of the possibility that Track is ever going to exist again, I am able to use Twitter again. Twitter, in its current crippled state, has proven to be fairly stable. By disabling my beloved Track, and other back end tweaks that they have no disclosed, they seem to be able to handle the load.

I also went on record that I didn’t want to use Twitter as a spamming/marketing platform as most people seem to want to do. Over the next few days/weeks, I’m going to try to reinvent Twitter’s usefulness to me. Since I once was more a consumer of information more than a provider, I now have to find a balance using the tools that are available to me. Of course, I could try to cling to my roots and use TwitterSpy, but then I would be lying to myself.

So as of today, I’m officially back on Twitter. The means by which I will use it is yet to be determined, but if you want to follow me on there, I’m at http://www.twitter.com/bwana.

Tags: Identi.ca, track, twitter

16 Responses to The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead

CannonGod

September 18th, 2008 at 8:59 am

I would have agreed with you several months ago as I was using TwitterFeed to deliver RSS updates. It was archaically slow updating, thus loosing any real-time interest. However they must have sped things up because now I can't upload my photos and change their names on Flickr before the bastard has tweeted them out with their DSC.xxxxxx01.JPEG default! ^_^*

Now I haven't tried it recently with RSS search feeds from Summize, but it should be pretty quick as Summize auto-refreshes it's searches every minute or so. Worth another shot ;¬)

Welcome back to Twitter (at least for the time being!)

Also, how are you liking Apture?

Adriano

October 6th, 2008 at 7:23 am

I believe the only sites that currently access the full Twitter XMPP firehose are: Zappos, FriendFeed and Twittervision. (Please update me with any corrections.)

There is a nice mash-up http://www.monitter.com which will follow three keywords with optional geo parameter. Wish those parameters could be part of their URL stem. Latency is part and parcel though…

Bwana

October 7th, 2008 at 7:56 am

Wow, great site. I'll add that to my Twitter bookmarks. Thanks for the info!

Twitter 2008: Get Used To It (Goodbye IM/Track) | Bwana.org

October 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am

[...] month, I blogged my return to Twitter due to the fact that the Track feature was dead. I saw the responses Twitter gave Steve [...]

RyanK

October 13th, 2008 at 10:14 am

Sorry i didn't find this post sooner!

You should check out my bot, TweetTrak… its the next best thing to what Track actually was. In some ways, its better, since it uses the twitter search engine so any query you can run there, can also be run via TweetTrak, continuously… It sends you text messages whenever it finds the term.

It is also near realtime… or as up to date as the search indexes are. It runs your search as often as once a minute, and it scales out to once every couple hours if it hasn't seen a new match in a few weeks. I think that's a fair trade off and should provide a lot of scalability.

At about 300 users now, and things are still running very smoothly, with a lot of new features planned. (ignoring updates from people, perhaps because they spam a lot or perhaps because you have device updates on for them, and eliminating dupes if a tweet matches multiple searches you're tracking)

Hope this helps!

RyanK

Bwana

October 13th, 2008 at 10:27 am

Thanks for commenting! I know about TweetTrak and I recommend it in my latest blog post. Keep up the good work.

Track Twitter via Kwippy

November 14th, 2008 at 1:21 am

[...] containing them on your IM(and mobile) was simply terrific. But then like all the good things Track too came to an end. Folks at identi.ca tried doing track but that too ran into some issues and thus had to be taken [...]

Rob Diana

January 10th, 2009 at 6:05 am

If you really want to view something like track, just get the RSS feed for the twitter search. It gives you the same info. However, I never really liked track and love the ability of getting the search through RSS.

bwana18751

January 10th, 2009 at 6:05 am

The problem with that solution is that it's not realtime. It's just not the same.

bwana18751

January 10th, 2009 at 6:05 am

I'll find a use for it, but it won't be the same as before, that's for sure. Thanks for reading.

Michael Sean Wright

January 10th, 2009 at 6:05 am

I too think that track is gone (at least the way we remembered it) but I thought the Twitter team was open to the idea of more access to the 'hose.' It's good to see you trying out Tweetdeck. I have really enjoyed being able to track real time conversations via the global search feature. Marc Canter has really been pushing the idea of the Open Mesh. With Bearhug Camp and other round-table discussions happening, hope we are close to seeing XMPP becoming a usable/ deployable standard. My real desire is to see a better live/ two way stream happen- now. Keep fighting the good fight and remember- it's good to open the palate, sometimes the new flavor is just as tasty.

bwana18751

January 10th, 2009 at 6:05 am

I still use Twitter search and it doesn't show you new results as they come in. You have to click the link to refresh. Even if it did refresh, it's not realtime. With track, I could track 25 terms in the same window and get the updates realtime, as they happen. Web/RSS updates don't hold a candle to the speed of IM/XMPP. I love Apture.

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The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead

16 Responses to The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead

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