Paper Reading #14: Eddi: Interactive Topic-based Browsing of Social Status Streams

Comments:
 Comment 1
 Comment 2

Reference Information:
Title: Eddi: Interactive Topic-based Browsing of Social Status Streams
Authors: Michael S. Bernstein, Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Jilin Chen, Sanjay Kairam, Ed H. Chi
Venue: UIST

Summary:
In this paper the authors describe Eddi, an interactive topic- based browsing system for social status streams. In a nutshell, Eddie prunes through tweets in order to associate them with various topics. The motivation for this is that users are currently faced with an overwhelmingly large number of tweets and no good way of sorting through them to read what the user finds interesting. Eddie uses callouts to a search engine in order to find relevant topics within the tweet. After declaring a tweet to these topics they are displayed on the screen in different fonts with the largest fonts having the largest number of tweets on that topic.

Discussion:

While I do believe that this is an interesting solution to a problem that many people who use twitter may have, I generally frown upon any technology that gives people any more reasons to spend countless hours on twitter or facebook. I believe too many people use facebook and twitter far too often and in order to tell the world of even the most mundane activities in their life. The fact that there is even a need for a program that can sort through twitter posts such as "I am now in the living room" is kind of sad.