Thinking about adding a Twitter stream to the Ubuntu install slideshow

[Ray Perigo]

I wouldn't be horribly opposed to seeing this. It'd be a nice way to
showcase the community aspect of the OS. That being said, the main thing to
consider here is exactly what content you would want to show in there. On
the one hand, filtering out negative commentary would shed the best
possible light on Ubuntu (important for the first-time installer), but it
feels slightly disingenuous to me. On the other hand, being fully open with
it allows for trolls to hijack the stream and fill Ubiquity with a bunch of
garbage nobody wants to deal with.

Perhaps splitting the difference and simply filtering out obscene and
inflammatory language could curb some of that and keep the shown discourse
a bit more civil?

Regarding localization, it might be cool to script it so that the shown
tweets are locale-centric, but not entirely limited to the user's language.
I'm not sure how technically feasible it is, but what about culling *most*
of the tweets from the user's own language and tossing in a smattering of
comments from all over the place - for example, if the user is on English,
they'd see a bunch of stuff in English with a bit of "Ich liebe Ubuntu!"
here and there. This might further drive home the breadth and scope of the
Ubuntu community, no?

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Ubuntu install slideshow for Precise should be a pretty ordinary
> little copy update, I think, so it'll just kind of happen little by
> little in the next couple months, as it does. Might be nice to tinker
> with it in Q, but that's the future, and the future can go jump in a
> lake for all I care :b
>
> One thing I would like to do is fix the last of the very
> English-looking pictures: the Ask Ubuntu one. (Well, especially very
> English-looking), and that is why I'm subjecting this list to a large
> and rambly email.
>
> I wonder if there would be any opposition to a live Twitter stream in
> that screenshot's place, where available, showing tweets containing
> #ubuntu? This would be on the last page of the slideshow.
> (By "Twitter stream" I'm talking about this thing, or something like
> it, styled to look pretty:
> https://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_search).
>
> I know Twitter is a proprietary service, but with my initial poking at
> the idea, there's a very diverse crowd represented in that search. I
> think it would be a neat way to quietly showcase the Ubuntu community
> as a living, breathing thing that exists right now, and it would say
> “see? you're not alone!”. And, hopefully, (most likely), the tweets
> will all be positive and welcoming.
>
> There is the issue that this stream needs to live (and be consistent)
> for five years, and I think that can be handled by some defensive js
> code, which we'll already need for the event that there's no Internet
> connection. It's also going on the assumption that, in five year's
> time, Twitter's stream for #ubuntu will still be nice to read, but I
> think that's a likely enough assumption.
>
> We can make the search language-specific (search Twitter with lang:zh,
> for example), though I worry that could make it a little sparse in
> some cases. We _might_ want to filter against negative language, in
> which case the search query would need to be localized. I think that
> can be done, too.
>
> I'm just throwing the idea around. Any other thoughts?
>
> Dylan
>
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