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Cadmus aims to filter spammy and repetitive tweets from your Twitter feed
There's no doubt that it's easy to become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of posts when you start to follow a lot of people on a social network. Cadmus is trying to help with that problem, specifically by filtering out similar toots from your Twitter feed, and grouping related toots.
My first impression of Cadmus was not good, but that was possibly due to Twitter's flakiness. I signed up for the service and linked it to my Twitter account using OAuth, and then ... nothing. It took about four hours before Cadmus was able to return any results. The results it now has are quite current, so maybe it needed some time to analyze my (oh no, I'm going to have to say it) "social graph". Or maybe Twitter was just being twittery and flaking out. It's hard to say.
So, now that it's returning results, how are they? Well, Cadmus reports that it is filtering out about 4% of my updates. Not bad, but at the same time it's not really going to save me a huge amount of time. The other thing Cadmus tries to do is to present the most relevant toots to you and group related ones together.
Maybe I'm not following enough accounts on Twitter, because Cadmus doesn't seem to be finding many related tweets among the 172 accounts I follow. This could also be due to the fact that it's the weekend, and there's no big news happening that many people would be likely to be tooting about all at once.
It's also tough to evaluate just what "relevant" means when it comes to ordering my updates. I couldn't care less about football, and three of the top ten updates on my Cadmus page were football-related. It's not really fair of me to expect Cadmus to know that I don't care about football, but at the same time it makes me suspicious of their use of the word relevant. Maybe "popular" would be more accurate.
My personal grouchiness aside, Cadmus seems like a well-designed and executed Twitter client that could prove to be useful, particularly during conferences or times of breaking news.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsDoron Ben ChaimJan 12th 2010 10:24AM
"spammy and repetitive tweets". Are there any other kinds?
SlappyJan 12th 2010 10:45AM
If one is trying to avoid spammy and/or repetitive tweets, especially repetitive ones, wouldn't it just be easier to turn the account off?
Booya! ;)
JayJan 12th 2010 11:24AM
Thanks for the review Jason.
I am sorry that your initial experience was not very good.
Over the last few days there has been a spike in the number of new accounts being created and so it took a little bit to pull in and analyze your stream.
The main idea behind Cadmus is that it helps users get the most out of their social media services by figuring out what all their friends are talking about. So every time you check in, we find the hottest conversations since your last visit and present them to you.
You are right about the distinction between relevant and popular. But we analyze your stream and your "social graph" (love that term!) over time and the more you use the service, the more we are able to figure out what is important to you. This also means that the first couple of times you check in we are essentially showing you what is popular. And as you mentioned, this is influenced by how many people you are following and how much activity is taking place.
Here is some more info about how Cadmus works - http://blog.anomalyinnovations.com/2009/12/cadmus-keeping-you-updated/.
Thanks again for the review.
Jay
http://thecadmus.com
Jason ClarkeJan 12th 2010 12:03PM
Thanks Jay, I appreciate the added info. It didn't occur to me that relevance would improve over time, though it made sense as soon as I read it.
In hindsight, my football example is probably not very fair; I follow a bunch of people that happen to be football fans, and on Sunday they tweet a lot about football. It would be very hard to algorithmically determine that I'm not interested in football tweets when I follow lots of people that are tweeting about it. In fact, it would probably look like I am interested in football.