About TwitterStand

Twitter is an electronic medium that allows a large user populace to communicate with each other simultaneously. Inherent to Twitter is an asymmetrical relationship between friends and followers thereby providing an interesting social network-like structure among the users of Twitter. Twitter messages, called tweets, are restricted to 140 characters and thus are usually very focused. The TwitterStand system (see also the related NewsStand system) being developed at the University of Maryland at College Park under the direction of Prof. Hanan Samet with his associates demonstrates the use of Twitter to build a news processing system from Twitter tweets. The key idea is to capture tweets that correspond to late breaking news. The result is analogous to a distributed news wire service. The difference is that the identities of the contributors/reporters are not known in advance and there may be many of them. The tweets are not sent according to a schedule. The tweets occur as news is happening and are noisy while usually arriving at a high throughput rate. Some of the issues include removing the noise, determining tweet clusters of interest bearing in mind that the methods must be online (i.e., clusters whose elements are constantly changing over time thereby reflecting the news cycle which is one of increasing volume as the topic becomes known, followed by a more steady decline as interest naturally fades), and determining the relevant location associated with the contents of the tweets (and accessing it with a map query interface) rather than the locations from where the tweets are sent. This is quite challenging and makes heavy use of the techniques developed for the NewsStand system.

Sponsored in part by NSF Grant IIS-09-48548

Relevant Publications:

J. Sankaranarayanan, H. Samet, B. Teitler, M.D. Lieberman, J. Sperling
TwitterStand: News in tweets.
In D. Agarwal, W. G. Aref, C.-T. Lu, M. F. Mokbel, P. Scheuermann, C. Shahabi, and O. Wolfson, editors, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, pages 42-51, Seattle, WA, November 2009.[link]
Categories: [spatio-textual search engine, Twitter]

Using TwitterStand:

TwitterStand was originally designed as a web application to be run on a desktop or laptop using a mouse interface, although it is available in both a web and app version. Instructions on using TwitterStand are provided below. The web version of TwitterStand can be found at: http://twitterstand.umiacs.umd.edu and can be executed using any of a number of browsers including, but not limited to Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. Depending on the underlying operating system, on most platforms, you have a choice of a mapping API among Bing Maps, Google Maps, and Google Earth. In particular, this is the case for the Windows and the MAC operating systems, while Google Earth is not available on Linux, and TwitterStand only supports Google Maps on the mobile devices. Note that a BING Maps Javascript API is available although it is very different than the Google Maps Javascript API thereby requiring a full rewrite of TwitterStand's map-specific funtionality.

The tweets in TwitterStand are collected, clustered, and displayed on a map in much the same way as NewsStand found at: http://newsstand.umiacs.umd.edu (that can be invoked from TwitterStand and from which Twitterstand can also be invoked) handles news articles from RSS feeds. The collection of news articles in NewsStand helps in inferring geographic locations for the tweets as they are not usually present in the 140 character limit on the size of the tweets. Much information associated with the tweet is available as a result of the URL which usually accompanies the tweet. It is important to note that the motivation for TwitterStand is an interest in showing geographic locations that are the subject of tweets, and not the locations from where people are tweeting. The latter is fairly easy to obtain as it is available as part of the tweet, while it is much more complex to determine the former.

TwitterStand is used in the same way as NewsStand, and like NewsStand, TwitterStand has two modes of operation which correspond to the two types of queries. The first is "Where is topic Y happening?" or "Top Stories Mode" (actually "Top Tweet Clusters"). The display has two panes where, assuming landscape (portrait) mode, the top tweet clusters are displayed on the left (top) pane. As you hover the mouse over them (or pan after a tap when using a gesturing touch screen interface), the relevant locations are displayed on the map that appears in the right (bottom) pane. You can explore the various tweets by clicking or tapping on them, which opens a new tab (or window depending on the browser and platform) for the tweet. You can come back to where you started (i.e., the pane with text on the left (top) and a map on the right (bottom)) by closing the tab. The query "What is happening in location X?" or "Map Mode" enables the use of a map to explore tweets that are newsworthy. As you zoom in, you get different tweets about the region you are zoomed to. For more details on the use of TwitterStand see the detailed description of NewsStand at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/newsstand-first-page.html.

Three YouTube videos of varying length narrated by Prof. Hanan Samet have been produced that demonstrate the web version of TwitterStand for tweets and news gathered at 8:30PM EST on April 7, 2010, and with a slightly older user interface. The videos have voice and are also close-captioned with summaries of the voice narrative. In this way, they can be run without the voice narrative in the background.

Long (6:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_OPxJGOI_8
Abbreviated (5:12): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmrZCaox1w
Shortest (3:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkmW1-ns64Q

Once you start the video, it is best to view it in full screen mode. This can be done by clicking on the button in the lower right corner of the YouTube screen (a small TV picture tube).