What is Twaller?

Twaller is a twitter based service which presents you with real-time travel related updates from people around the world. Our search engine queries and presents relevant tweets at Twitter. We sort updates into locations and categories, providing you an interface to browse tweets at ease.

How is Twaller more useful than Twitter Search?

While we are travelling, the people who have the most relevant information for us are not necessarily the people we follow on Twitter, but rather the local people who already know the area. Twaller wants to connect you with those people and their tweets that are relevant to you for your travelling needs.

Twitter also offers a search service on all tweets in public timeline. The volume of tweets is huge and mostly irrelevant. Twaller offers an unique natural language processing engine which filters tweets to show you only those which are extremely relevant to you. Check out a Twaller page for a city near you and let us know what you feel about our algorithm.

How is Twaller different from other search services such as Bing Twitter?

Recently, both Microsoft and Google announced that they will be providing search services on tweets (Please read here and here). We are thrilled that the World's largest software companies and the best minds are working to organize the enormous volume of real-time information flowing in via Twitter. We salute the openness that Twitter is promoting, and believe there will many more services and applications that enhance the experience of Twitter.

At Twaller, we are dedicated to promote real-time interactions between travelers. Identifying relevant tweets and organizing them is a key component of our service, and we are delighted to use the search engine of Twitter currently, and hopefully of Bing and Google in future. We feel that our value-add is different from search, it is to facilitate ways and means for travelers to interact. We are working hard to deliver these features, and will keep you posted.

How do I sign in into my account?

Twaller allows you to sign in your Twitter account using OAuth technology recommended by Twitter. Sign-in happens at a Twitter website, after which you are redirected back to us. This ensures that we do not have your password at any time. We only have access to your loginname and minor particulars such as your website, and location. Twitter allows us to use your account as long as you permit us to.

Signing in with Twitter allows you to use our friendly user interface to post your travel updates to Twitter, as well as reply to the recent tweets displayed.

We also completely respect your privacy and will never share your profile with anyone, not solicit you with any emails. In case you have any questions or concerns, please write to us at support@twaller.com.

How do you search tweets?

Simply put, our engine searches Twitter with relevant keywords and then filters and categorizes the data. We strive to bring you the most relevant tweets, so we filter out tweets that are mere advertisements or those that lack anything concrete.

Where do you get your referred links from?

Those come from a Google search with relevant keywords. We do not manipulate or favor any referred links.

How can I get my tweet up here?

Tweet something relevant while your are travelling, and chances are high that your tweet will be shown here. You may use the hashtags: #weather, #food, #shop, #enjoy and #sightseeing to help us organize your tweets. You may use any other device or website (such as Twitter.com) to post your updates with the above mentions, and you will see them here. Since we show only the most relevant real-time data, the time window during which your tweet will be displayed is small.

What platform is this service based on?

We are based in Java. Our service uses several open-source software such as Apache, MySQL, Hibernate, and Twitter4J, apart from Twitter and Google web services. We immensely thank numerous developers in the open-source community for their efforts in the above software.

What new features do you have coming up?

The current release is a Beta preview. We have planned deployments coming in the next few months. We have a planned release schedule every Friday 12:00am PDT, so you can expect to see updates on the website every week.

How do I provide feedback? Can I contribute to improving this website?

Absolutely, we eagerly await input from the community. We are currently using Google Code as a forum. You can document bugs that you encounter at Twaller in the issues section.

What affiliation do you have with Twitter?

None, other than using their publicly available web services.

Is this service free? What's your revenue model?

Absolutely, just like the Internet should always be. Currently, we are focussing on delivering enhanced services to you, and therefore we are not that focussed on our earnings.