Tag clouds are so 2006. But they work if used well, and hopefully this is a nice start. Inactive as the action is non obvious at this point. These are entries in a collection, so data around them will be minimal until we scale a bit. Eventually in the same way that we share “other people tracking ‘eats’” it will be interesting to share “other people who ‘eats’ ‘tofu’“. This is an obvious place to link to that content.

A couple of new charts show the overall and individual inputs for the past couple of weeks to the collection. The ‘past month’ and ‘all time’ equivalents are ready to roll - but given our oldest data is less than 2 weeks old they are a little dull at the moment.

Feedback request

One of the objectives of datatoy is to keep the tweet commands “natural”. That is, they should be readable and sensible to a human aswell as a script on a server. The comments which accompany commands have no direct impact on data being added to your charts - but add a richer “feel” to your collections. Occasionally however they get mistaken for the actual content, and you might see odd things appear on your collections.

For example, in the coffee example above we see “costa latte”. Should we store “costa” or “costa latte” or both? If we take both we can relate “latte” from “starbucks latte” or “costa latte”. Some tweeking is needed here.

If you think any of your tweets have been interpreted oddly do let us know by tweeting @datatoy a link to your collection, or by commenting on this post.

Feedback feedback feedback!

*biketraining 21Km

The new feature is going to work like this NOTE - this isn’t live yet I’ll update this post when it is

target *biketraining 100km

This sets a new target for my bike training - to cover 100km.This is a simple target, no deadline or other details. It will work for anything else too - like calories or A grades or episodes of Heroes.

We can check our target by sending a request:

*biketraining ?target

Which will send a summary tweet back informing you that of 100Km you have 80Km remaining, and (probably) when the target was initially set.

Here’s the question Do you want to receive that summary as an automated response every time you tweet towards that target?

We’ll certainly send a congrats tweet when you reach the target - and a continual feedback would be nice - but I’m aware that one of the top objectives of datatoy is specifically NOT to swamp your twitter feed with updates.