Twitter + Amazon Mechanical Turk = TwitTurk or Frankenstwit

Posted on Friday 3 April 2009

I tried to do some marketing by connecting with people on Twitter. At first I thought a simple search on twitter to get the relevant tweets and then reply to them. It works, but it gets boring pretty fast and I abandoned it. Then I saw Guy Kawasaki plugging hockey.alltop.com to all that dared talked about hockey on twitter. This was basically what I was doing, but the fact it was automated was obvious. The replies were not very relevant and this was the reason why I was not willing to go that route.

That is when I thought about Amazon Mechanical Turk. I always wanted to use it, but hadn’t really had a project for it. Now was my luck, I logged in and was denied because Amazon Payment was restricted to U.S. credit card. It slowed me all of 3 minutes. In fact once your account is setup you can use any credit card you want, not just U.S. issued ones. back to twitturk, I now had all the ingredients so I put together a little ruby script.

First it reads the feeds for a query on search.twitter.com. Each is posted as a hit on mechanical Turk, a “hit” is the name of a unit of work. A hit is basically a form to input the best answer for the original question. Here is the tricky part, you want to allow the worker some leeway, but not too much. It must be possible to say the original twit doesn’t warrant an answer, while the answer must contains all the right stuff for your goal. Here is a sample scenario.

If the original twit is “Going to play hockey with the guys, I just love this game”. Then it is probably ok to answer with a link to hockey.alltop.com. While if the original twit is “My significant other is still glued to the TV watching hockey, I just hate it”, then you may want to pass. After that there is the leeway in the response you want to leave the worker. You want the link to be correct, but at the same time you probably want a human to craft an answer with some reference the original tweet. I think that an answer that target something from the query is much better. Mechanical Turk allows some validation on the fields of the Hit. like mandatory, maximum size and regular expression. This allows to at least validate the answer will fit in 140 characters and contain a URL that leads to the page you wanted to target.

When the script is restarted it checks for completed hits with an answer and post them to twitter. I kept the duration for the Hit pretty short, but there is some delay. On average I would say less than 60 minutes from query to answer. You also have to monitor Mechanical turk so the work is done properly, but it is not too bad and you can just let the hit be, they get auto-approved after a fixed period of time. Once the tweet is posted, the script follows this person and will not send them another tweet unless they are following back.

I ran this little experiment for about 3 weeks, the result where interesting. At 0.055$ per Hit, I found it a bit too expansive for my case. At a lower price per hit, I was not getting enough Amazon workers. In the ends this means that for about the price twitterhawk is charging per tweet you could have someone decide if a tweet is warranted and compose one. I guess it really depends on the value you put on your tweets. Also I learned that most people didn’t saw this as spam. I was bracing myself for outcry, but just some people complained. I was thinking I would have to pull the plug in 2 minutes, but it was not the case in the end. In fact if you look at alltop you’ll see not that many reply in outcry. I really feel like I’ve created a monster, but it was fun.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 11:14
Filed under: Uncategorized
Why Google Maps In Mexico is so poor

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2009

Anyone knows why Microsoft Live maps as such a superior street coverage in mexico than Google Maps?

Jean-Francois Noel @ 11:49
Filed under: Uncategorized
Katamari damacy ad against AIDS

Posted on Wednesday 12 November 2008

A nice stunt, I was wondering if this was a new game. They certainly catch my attention and it is for a good cause.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 19:36
Filed under: Uncategorized
My Own Sanguino

Posted on Wednesday 12 November 2008


Now I’m really on my way to make my reprap. I’ll try to post photos of the next components too as I make them, I’ll try to get the real camera and not my IPhone for those. The Sanguino maybe doesn’t look like much but it is a cool micro controller and even if I’m bad at soldering, it works.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 11:57
Filed under: Uncategorized
Kiva activities and FriendFeed

Posted on Monday 8 September 2008

Micro-loans are great and have never been easier than with Kiva. You can see my lender page there. It’s fun, but I think they should also make an RSS feed of my activities there, then I can link it to my FriendFeed stuff, and then we can all challenge each other to do more.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 12:44
Filed under: Uncategorized
Paul McCartney in Quebec

Posted on Wednesday 23 July 2008

I was on the Plains of Abraham last sunday for Sir Paul McCartney show. Great night, my 7 years old daughter danced to the Beatles, the Wings, etc… The official report is that there were about 250000 people. I took the opportunity of taking some pics from my IPhone 3G. They are not very good but here they are.

Those were the people behind us:
People Behind us at 2008-07-20 Paul Mccartney show. IPhone 3G cam.
And more of them
People Behind us at 2008-07-20 Paul Mccartney show. IPhone 3G cam.
The scene from where we were
The Scene for Quebec Paul Mccartney show. IPhone 3G cam.
We Mostly watched this screen (the ones showing Paul McCartney are all overexposed)
One Of the Screen at Paul Mccartney show. IPhone 3G cam.
Although the pictures are not that good it’s nice to get them wherever you want without carrying anything else than your phone. It also nice I uploaded them with the Wordpress IPhone app.

Go over the official Paul McCartney website for more informations.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 22:18
Filed under: iphone
A new Blog for See Your Hotel

Posted on Monday 14 July 2008

A blog about hotel location for travel destination. We’ll try to keep it very focused on destinations and hotel location. We’ll see how it goes.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 10:24
Filed under: Uncategorized
I guess he likes his Roomba

Posted on Saturday 28 June 2008

Once you start with video…

Jean-Francois Noel @ 22:03
Filed under: Uncategorized
Video over at The Pirate’s Dilemma

Posted on Saturday 28 June 2008

Go see it or press play. It is interesting and an easy introduction material to share.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 21:33
Filed under: peerdata
Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur

Posted on Thursday 1 May 2008

In the eternal question of age and the entrepreneur here is some data: Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur. This is interesting and surprising for me, but something caught my eye in the report itself. If you read it they also talk about education and there is one place where they give sales figure and number of employee for all the company they studied. They split this in three category all, all with a finished diploma from an ivy league and all with only high school diploma. The numbers are

All : average sales of 5.7 millions USD and an average of 42 workers
All ivy league founder : average sales of 6.6 millions USD and an average of 55 workers
All high school founder : average sales of 2.2 millions USD and an average of 18 workers

I wished they had splitted the data more because the average sales per worker is really bugging me. The ivy league numbers is 121818 per worker, the high school number is 122222 per worker. Maybe I’m the only one focusing on this number, but I like seeing it as the average value produced by workers. Anyway here comes the real story the number for all the company is 135714 per worker. The gap is more than 10%, so there is one category which is performing better than the two the report writer decided to extract. So I guess non ivy league college are good.

Jean-Francois Noel @ 12:19
Filed under: Uncategorized