Twitter summaries: beyond visualization
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The use of Twitter during conferences or courses is becoming common
practice --the so-called backchannel-- but it's also gaining momentum
as a medium to collectively narrate ongoing events such as "breaking
news" or sports meetings. Thus, Twitter becomes a way to summarize the
event and stimulate the conversation, not only among those users
physically attending, but also among anyone interested in the given
event.

Needless to say, trying to follow an event stream on Twitter can be
overwhelming, especially if it's a massive one. In addition to the
simple impossibility to read at a pace close to the tweeting rate,
there exist other issues such as the unavoidable portion of irrelevant
tweets, or the presence of redundant information. These and other
problems can be framed within the much broader term of "information
overload". Hence, it's clear that, no matter the potential of Twitter,
it will be of limited usefulness for collective narration until a
practical method to distill amenable information for human consumption
is available.

During our talk we will introduce a prototype for event monitoring in
Twitter which tackles with all of the aforementioned issues. In
addition to demoing the tool, we will provide details on the
architecture devised to face the huge message load to analyze, and we
will also discuss the growth potential of the platform and its
flexibility to add new filtering criteria in the future.

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Authors:
David J. Brenes (Simplelogica)
Diego Fernández (Simplelogica)
Dr. Daniel Gayo Avello (Universidad de Oviedo)