Helping to sift through the Twitter nonsense
A browser plugin. That can’t be free. Sorry.
I put together a prototype for a browser plugin that inserts itself in TweetDeck (and eventually, twitter.com), and performs image matching analysis to help people filter out fakes:
Today’s airline disaster was a great example of where it is useful, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. War scenes, road accidents and even sports crowds have all been faked before now, and Twitter would probably be a better place if we had a little help in filtering out the nonsense.
But there’s a problem. You can’t have the plugin yet. It relies upon the TinEye API to function (which is to say, they are the ones doing all the smart stuff here, not me)- it’s really quite expensive, and I can’t pay for all of you. The silver lining to the cloud is that we only need to check each image once, then store the result somewhere. So 10,000 people could all share the same result between them. But someone still needs to pay in the first place.
So I’m listening for ideas — how could we make this happen? A Kickstarter to pile up a huge collection of TinEye credits for us all to slowly work through? Feels short-sighted. Developer a TinEye competitor? Feels over-ambitious. Have a generous corporate sponsor that would give API access to their image search engine? Hello Google/Bing/Everyone.
What do you think?
