Thinking about adding a Twitter stream to the Ubuntu install slideshow

[Jeff Lane]

On 01/16/2012 07:11 PM, Dylan McCall wrote:

> 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.

One question would be whether Twitter would be happy with us or not for 
adding who knows how many new clients at once (thinking of number of 
installs done within the first 2 weeks of a release) that's a huge hit 
to Twitter's service twice a year... wonder if it could be considered a 
DOS of sorts? Just wondering there, I'm really not sure how that side of 
Twitter's service works, but it seems that the potential for a million 
new clients hitting the twitter service in one day may be problematic?

I like your idea in theory, I just wonder how that would work out in 
practice.

> 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.

Additionally, what for those installs that don't have network access? 
Would that "slide" get automatically dropped? Maybe replaced by a static 
slide? or would they get a blank app with no happy tweets?

> 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.

Another question: how difficut/trivial would it be to do this? From the 
way I read this, you'd be filtering twitter for Spanish tweets when the 
Spanish language is chosen, German for the German locale, etc.  Would 
any content filtering also need to extend to catching things considered 
"negative" or non-family-friendly in each of the supported installation 
languages?

>
> I'm just throwing the idea around. Any other thoughts?

Anyway, as I said, I think this is a neat idea and it sounds like it 
would make the installer slide show feel a lot more "connected" and 
dynamic than just a static slide show.  Even better, how about a means 
for the user to actually tweet from the slideshow? Or would that be 
carrying it too far?

:)


-- 
Jeff Lane - Hardware Certification Engineer and Test Tools Developer
Ubuntu Ham: W4KDH
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