I need a couple of guinea pigs...

...and you'd better make them extra large...

OK Muppets, literally months of my spare time has been shovelled into creating a Saints' online resource for all you funsters that are too lazy to spend all day trousering* Twitter.

Drum roll...

I give you ZeitgeiStMarys - capturing the spirit of the minute for #saintsfc**

It basically swallows all the tweets that mention #saintsfc, and every 60 seconds it produces an animated word cloud that shows the most popular discussion subjects during that last minute***.

Like this:

The bigger the text, the more popular that topic is. If something is shown in orange, it is trending in popularity over the last 15 minutes, if it is shown in blue then it is trending down, and if it is shown in grey it is neither trending up nor down. Shades in between orange-grey-blue reflect the gradient of the change.

If you click on word a Twitter search page will be opened containing references to that word****

THIS REALLY IS NOT READY TO BE RELEASED TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC. So I thought I'd get a few Muppets to take a look first.

And now the specific warnings...

1) At the moment this isn't designed for mobile access. It will have unpredictable behaviour on phones and tablets. Desktop only at the moment.

2) It has been designed to work on modern browsers, so if you're not using a modern browser you will run into trouble. I've largely tested it on Chrome v35, but have also done some testing on Firefox v30 and Opera v22. Internet Explorer is a law unto itself, so whilst v11 sort-of works I would expect more problems on that platform at the moment.

3) I'm not a proper programmer any more, so it will likely break, or be slow, or go offline for lengthy periods during its development.

4) I have no idea how it will perform if it becomes popular, so again, expect delays.

5) It does not have a ****ing swear filter at the moment, so you shrinking violets from The Lounge have been warned.

* Spending all day searching for the latest Saints-related information is colloquially known as trousering Twitter.

** Pretentious, eh?

*** It actually looks at the last 1000 tweets to determine the Twitter zeitgeist for that minute.

**** My anal side forces me to point out that they are not actually words, but tokens.

I'd appreciate some feedback.

http://zeitgeistmarys.herokuapp.com/desktop-only/270614/1

Bletch.

Toke's a ****.

I guess that's Alpine Saint.

At 4pm today everyone needs to tweet #saintsfc tokyos am homosex

PS - impressed that you know how to make stuff like that bletch!

Oops.

Application Error

 

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

 

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

just as a side issue this is the second time today I've clicked into a thread hoping to sell someone a couple of guinea pigs + been disappoint . Pls no more mislead thread titles!

Oops.

Well, you were warned.

Do you see that every time you try to load the page?

Did it ever work?

What happened if you re-loaded?

Thanks for your help.

Working now. Only got that error the first time.

Looks good. Arguably more useful when there isn't one obvious story dominating tweets (Luke Shaw is off the Man U? Who knew?!) but like the idea.

At 4pm today everyone needs to tweet #saintsfc tokyos am homosex

 

PS - impressed that you know how to make stuff like that bletch!

That is an excellent idea, Bear.

But during the development and testing I've seen those words feature prominently probably a thousand times - and most of those Tweets originated from Japan.

Occasionally the terms dogsexer, labrawhore and dicplug are also seen with the ones you mention above.

Obviously couldn't be arsed to read the first bit past the word game but when are we going to find out who the poster is?

also, it is plugdic bletch, dicplug sounds like an international adapter of some sort.

Working now. Only got that error the first time.

 

Looks good. Arguably more useful when there isn't one obvious story dominating tweets (Luke Shaw is off the Man U? Who knew?!) but like the idea.

Good to hear. I was restarting processes on the server so it might have been that.

Re the single theme, yes you're right. What I've found useful is looking for the unusual words - usually foreign, that turn out to be someone speculating about a specific player - dušan at the moment for example.

Yes, thought exactly the same, certainly saves me having to trawl through lots of crap on the #saintsfc hashtag when i have a quick look for news.

The bar graph at the side makes for interesting reading now Shaw's move has been confirmed. 7 words way ahead of the rest.

The bar graph at the side makes for interesting reading now Shaw's move has been confirmed. 7 words way ahead of the rest.

Yes, it's a frequency distribution that shows the frequency (popularity) of each of the terms.

That is about as extreme a swing as I've seen it produce. Big news I guess.

Basically nothing else is being discussed on the #saintsfc channel of Twitter.

And as you can see completes and move are in orange, which means that those terms are trending compared to rest of the text.

It's only bloody working!

And now swung the other way with news of Lallana's medical. Although most of the words are now in orange?

Good work bletch, I like it.

Would be good to know the numbers to go with those bars, to get some idea of the volume of tweets. Or is there somewhere and I can't see it?

And now swung the other way with news of Lallana's medical. Although most of the words are now in orange?

 

Good work bletch, I like it.

Good to hear, Mr. Minty.

Yes, the colouring will need some tuning. It happens like that just after a big story (lallana and shaw) are starting to cool down, and the other terms are all increasing in a minor way. As I say, it needs a bit of tuning.

Would be good to know the numbers to go with those bars, to get some idea of the volume of tweets. Or is there somewhere and I can't see it?

Yes, that's on the to-do list Minty.

Whilst I actually store the last 20,000 tweets, at the moment I'm 'only' examining the most recent 1000. I found that any more than that meant that the 'echo' of big events that happened 15,000 tweets ago, still gets represented in the chart. I want the chart to reflect what is being discussed 'now'.

So, with that in mind, I can either show another bar chart with the time on one axis, and the volume of tweets on the other and animate it every minute. And/or, I can simply put a count on the tooltip (the text that appears if you hover over a term or a bar chart). The count would show the number of mentions that the term had had (in the last 1000 tweets).

To be honest, #saintsfc doesn't get many mentions compared to other football hash tags such as #mufc. I've set up an equivalent for #mufc here as I wanted to see if I could cope with the scale of tweets. It seems OK at the moment. I did also monitor #england and #eng (when we were still in the world cup) and that produced a massive amount of tweets - and a lot of swearing!

At 4pm today everyone needs to tweet #saintsfc tokyos am homosex

 

PS - impressed that you know how to make stuff like that bletch!

Id actually be up for doing this

The tweeting that is bear, not the honosex

What is "semoga?"

What is "semoga?"

Sorry Jonnyboy, I've been away oopnorf for the weekend.

Assuming that you aren't asking a deeply philosophical question, or beating fatalists round the head with your determinism, I think it's Indonesian and means "hopefully".

So as you say...

What is 'hopefully'?

Deep mate. Deep.

One of the oddities of twitter is that you occasionally get a stream of overseas posts, and if you watch the word cloud long enough, you'll also see lots of foreign character sets. This was especially true when Japan played games in the WC and Yoshida was mentioned in a #saintsfc context.

For example スポーツナビ is often popular on the #mufc version. I'm sure Toke would confirm that it translates as Sports-Navi. Which I assume is a Japanese sport web site.

It's actually quite fascinating, though I was sceptical. However, I would have thought Watson and Lee may have made some impact?

Nice work bletch! I’ve been watching it during my lunch-break and have found it to be quite mesmerising, albeit in a rather depressing way at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action when we start signing players. Definitely a very useful resource imo; I’m in; it’s a yes from me.

It's actually quite fascinating, though I was sceptical. However, I would have thought Watson and Lee may have made some impact?

For God's sake Burpy T, give them time! They've only been here 5 minutes, and haven't even had a chance to work with the players yet.

Actually, it's all about the moment (minute) in time and the volume of tweets.

Watson is there, and Sammy Lee was really trending yesterday. The Twitterati has moved on.

Also, remember that I'm only showing the top 150 #saintsfc terms on Twitter, so Lee may be still there, but at a rank below 150.

Future versions will allow you to select how many 'words' you want to display.

Nice work bletch! I’ve been watching it during my lunch-break and have found it to be quite mesmerising, albeit in a rather depressing way at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action when we start signing players. Definitely a very useful resource imo; I’m in; it’s a yes from me.

You've touched me Halo. #metaphorically

I do know what you mean about the mesmerising nature of the animation. Glad you can see the value.

You've touched me Halo. #metaphorically

 

I do know what you mean about the mesmerising nature of the animation. Glad you can see the value.

Are you able to 'monetize' this?

Are you able to 'monetize' this?

In a more Impressionism style?

How many tweets per minute actually mention saints? There are surely only a few per minute, so how can you have more that 150 popular terms in that period? It's quite interesting though, I'd maybe change the font or the shape of the cloud.

Are you able to 'monetize' this?

Well, I've already been able to clear out your WestPac bank account whilst you were being mesmerized by my trojan animations.

It's a good question tpbury, I doubt it.

In a more Impressionism style?

Very good.

How many tweets per minute actually mention saints? There are surely only a few per minute, so how can you have more that 150 popular terms in that period? It's quite interesting though

You're right that with the volume of #saintsfc tweets there is unlikely to be 150 different 'words' in the last minute. So to arrive at the 150 tokens I look back at the, then, last 1000 tweets. The length of time that the last 1000 tweets spans, changes depending on how many #saintsfc tweets there has been. Sometimes you might be looking at the last minute of tweets (when news stories are happening quickly and many people are tweeting) and sometimes you might be looking at a visualisation of the last 24 hours of tweets.

The following is full of technical details, but if you're interested here's the logic I use.

I actually store the last 20,000 (an arbitrary number) tweets that mention #saintsfc, this happens continuously all the time and as soon as Twitter receives the tweet from a punter, it is sent to me to store.

From this long list, every minute I take a snapshot of the, then, last 1000 (again, an arbitrary number) tweets.

From this list I workout what constitutes the 'words', I remove a bunch of stuff that isn't important and that would simply skew results (RT, @twitternames, URLs, shortened URLs, etc.), and then I combine the power of like terms (i.e. lallana, lallana's, #lallana and #lallana's all relate to the same thing).

To measure the rate of change (orange/grey/blue), I look at what the situation was 15 minutes ago and for each of the words I compute how much it has changed +ve/-ve. I actually store the rate of change over the last 1, 5, 15, 60 and 1440 minutes, but at the moment the user is fixed to seeing rate of change over the last 15 minutes. A future version will...etc.

Then in the browser, every minute it looks to get the current 150 terms and it works out what has changed and animates the word cloud accordingly.

I'd maybe change the font or the shape of the cloud.

Yeah, all the mechanics to do that are in the code, but I haven't surfaced them for the user at the moment. Examples...

Toke's a ****.

love this... a great little snapshot of things #saintsfc related

love this... a great little snapshot of things #saintsfc related

Why, thank you SO16_Saint. That's certainly what I'm aiming for.

Firstly, apologies to all Muppets for subverting this little corner of TMS for my own purposes - and for interrupting the discussions on carrot-top cunninglus correlation. Fascinating BTW.

Thanks for all the feedback so far, I'm experimenting with the scale of the font size at the moment.

The smallest font size is now smaller and the way I allocate the different font sizes to the different 'words' has changed.

This should mean that the word cloud packs more tightly...

...and will eventually make it easier to support mobile devices.

For those using ZeitgeiStMarys regularly, if you notice any difference please let me know.

I'm unsure what will happen when we get a small number of very popular terms (i.e. when our Captain decides he wants to joins another team), so please provide any feedback you can if/when you see a scenario like that.

http://zeitgeistmarys.herokuapp.com/desktop-only/270614/1

Bletch.

"Moaning" is one of the top sfc words. Classic.

does this thing monitor the main board?

"Moaning" is one of the top sfc words. Classic.

Yes, CB Saint, at 2:14am on Tuesday 1st July ZeitgeiStMarys became self-aware...

does this thing monitor the main board?

Not yet, although it's on the todo list, but be careful what you wish for. Imagine waking up to a bright orange, 160pt font size alpine_saint filling your browser window!

I'd like to merge the twitter zeitgeist with TSW so that you get a real sense for what is being discussed - ephemerally on Twitter and in more detail on here.

I plan to allow the user to click / tap on a word and then show all the discussions on here, and the tweets on Twitter where that 'word' has been mentioned. Then by following those links it will take you either to twitter or to a post in a thread in a forum on here.

If you want guinea fowl I can help you out

If you want guinea fowl I can help you out

Spatchcock?

Yep, just ignore the imprint of the tyre tread.

Strangely, arse is trending at the moment

Picks Lallana confirmation (quickly)

Strangely, arse is trending at the moment

Hmmm.

What is "barumu?"

I believe it's a whale's vagina.

Must be the Indonesians' nickname for Kat then.

I believe it's a whale's vagina.

Isn't that called a Robbiesavage, Toke?

Oh, you lucky Muppets. The word cloud has a new default font...

Also, does anyone know what the thenewfishfingersandwichforum.freeforums.org is?

It seems to be another Saints' forum as I'm getting traffic from it, but I don't seem to be able to find it. Odd.

http://zeitgeistmarys.herokuapp.com/desktop-only/270614/1

First time I've had a look, on my tab with chrome.

I have to say that's a cracking piece of work. Well done.

Also, does anyone know what the thenewfishfingersandwichforum.freeforums.org is?

That was my nickname at school

This is proper genius Bletch!

Would be a great little addition to lots of different forums.

Top work fella.

First time I've had a look, on my tab with chrome.

 

I have to say that's a cracking piece of work. Well done.

Good to hear hutch, although I know that I've still got some work to do for tablets/phones.

This is proper genius Bletch!

Would be a great little addition to lots of different forums.

Top work fella.

Now, now, now, Gay Boot. Genius is too strong a term. I'd settle for visionary or perhaps messiah.

But if you'll allow me to flick the switch on the top of my knob for a moment...You ain't seen nothin' yet!

So much to do, and not enough time...

That was my nickname at school

What, Free Forums?

You'll have to explain that one to me one day over a white wine spritzer.

Good to hear hutch, although I know that I've still got some work to do for tablets/phones.

Can't see a problem on Sony Xperia tab with Chrome and kit kat.

first post

This is brilliant, I hate twitter, but it contains useful information... This helps me find it.

You should hawk it to the club, sure they would buy the ip to add to their website, they are all about social media now (apparently).

Thanks

first post

 

This is brilliant, I hate twitter, but it contains useful information... This helps me find it.

 

You should hawk it to the club, sure they would buy the ip to add to their website, they are all about social media now (apparently).

 

Thanks

Welcome to the forum Plastic. More importantly, welcome to The Muppet Show.

Welcome to the forum Plastic. More importantly, welcome to The Muppet Show.

Thanks. I've brought a bottle of rosé with me.