Twitter Hash Tags for the Regionals

[Justin]

Hi Everyone,

This one is for the twitter users out there. Perhaps some of you have followed the presidential election, or inauguration night using Twitter Search. What you end up with especially for live events is a pretty cool real-time or near-realtime back channel discussion of that live event. To see an example of hash tags in action goto http://search.twitter.com/ and type in: #frc

So here's what I'm thinking maybe we could agree beforehand on a standard system for tagging the various regionals, etc. One thought I had is perhaps do something like #frcwk1 #nh this way if you search for #frcwk1 one you'd see everything being talked about for week 1 regionals and if you did #frcwk1 #nh you'd see only stuff about the NH regional.

Also don't forget about sites like twitpic that allow you to upload photos to twitter in near-realtime which could be useful for scouting, etc.

Just some thoughts hopefully fellow twitter addicts like myself will chime in.

Good Luck Everyone!!

-Justin

[Zholl]

You know, this might actually get me to use twitter . Anyway, this seems like a pretty good idea, as long as everyone that would use it is in on it.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Maybe just use #frc without a week attached? You know how easy it is to loose track of time..

Either way, I'm game.

If you care, its @tombottiglieri

[GGCO]

Yeah i'll use twitter if we could get something going for the competition at gvsu in grand rapids Michigan.

[pitzoid]

Hold on....

we were already looking at something that FRC FMS will directly update, more info soon...

[Justin]

Originally Posted by pitzoid

Hold on....

we were already looking at something that FRC FMS will directly update, more info soon...

That's good and I think Blue Alliance has done match results updates in the past. What I'm referring to here is a way to tag conversations. This way if you monitor #FRC or whatever people decide on you can see what people are talking about or pictures they might post or whatever beyond just match results which are useful to.

-Justin

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by pitzoid

Hold on....

we were already looking at something that FRC FMS will directly update, more info soon...

I would absolutely love if the FRC FMS published match results to something parsable in real time. The HTML scraping we're doing right now to get match results is extremely inelegant.

I hope you get it up and running!

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

I would absolutely love if the FRC FMS published match results to something parsable in real time.

www.usfirst.org/getMatchInfo?eventId=something&match_num=something

that returns a short XML blurb would be fantastic.

[pitzoid]

We were going to do an XML feed this year from each event, but thought it'd be easier to use Twitter as you guys will be able to do more things with their already published API (mobile devices, etc...). Maybe get us some exposure out of the immediate FIRST community too.

right now the account is "frcfms", if you guys want to go ahead a subscribe, you'll recieve our test data as it gets put up.... When we get a final config, I'll post here was it is and we'll send out a twitter message about that

THX

[synth3tk]

I never knew about that Twitter Search thing, or the #tags option. I just recently made one for our team, and never really "got" Twitter.

I think #frc would more than suffice.

[mom1155]

NYC Regional will be using #frc, #ftc, #fll, #jrfll, #omgrobots, #nycfirst, #firstlive

[Fletch1373]

For those of you interested in scraping the FMS twitter feed (@FRCFMS), the twitter API provides JSON and XML sources and the FMS feed provides all the information you'll need(I did it last year)...


example:

#FRCNJ TY E MC 20 RF 55 BF 23 RE 2016 303 1676 BL 102 1647 1089 RB 30 BB 20 RP 3 BP 0

Event Hashtag: #FRC<regional code>
Match Type: TY <P/Q/E>

Practice
Qualification
Elimination

Match number: MC <number>
Final Scores: RF <red> BF <blue>
Red teams: RE <R1> <R2> <R3>
Blue teams: BL <B1> <B2> <B3>
Bonus scores(minibot race): RB <red> BB <blue>
Penalty scores: RP <red> BP <blue>


You could also use the twitter API for the specific event hashtags, if you only want a specific event

Send me a private message if you would like to see the python script I had last year to parse the XML feed from last year and insert it into a mysql database.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

I would absolutely love if the FRC FMS published match results to something parsable in real time. The HTML scraping we're doing right now to get match results is extremely inelegant.

I hope you get it up and running!

I would second this, XML would be really nice for both history data and match data. Scraping HTML is always a messy affair.

As for the thread topic, I would tag them #FRC and then the regional code, so for the West Michigan event #FRCMI

[Justin]

Yeah #FRC works as well I just thought it might be nice to has a way to separate the regional chatter from the general stuff going on #FRC but then I'm not sure that #FRC is incredibly active at this point.

Also if you're using a Mac here (Fluid and Twitter Search) a is a really great way to view these searches in real-time. On your iPhone (what you don't have an iPhone?*) you can use Tweetie or an number of other clients to monitor searches as well.

-Justin

* Sorry I'm an unabashed Apple/Mac geeks so do with that what you will.