mixamail on S Anand

Google search via e-mail

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:07:52 +0000

I’ve updated Mixamail to access Google search results via e-mail.

For those new here, Mixamail is an e-mail client for Twitter. It lets you read and update Twitter just using your e-mail (you’ll have to register once via Twitter, though).

Now, you can send an e-mail to twitter@mixamail.com with a subject of “Google” and a body containing your query. You’ll get a reply within a few seconds (~20 seconds on my BlackBerry) with the top 8 search results along with the snippets.

It’s the snippets that contain the useful information, as far as I’m concerned. Just yesterday, I managed to find the show timings for Manmadan Ambu at the Ilford Cine World via a search on Mixamail. (Mixamail win, but the movie was a let down, given expectations.)

You don’t need to be registered to use this. So if you’re ever stuck with just e-mail access, just mail twitter@mixamail.com with a subject “Google”.

PS: The code is on Github.

Comments

S Anand 29 Dec 2010 3:48 pm: Sorry about that, Shankar. I’ve fixed that. (Simple bug: was looking for registration even though it wasn’t required)
Shankar V 29 Dec 2010 5:36 am:AnandI tried to send an email to this id with subject Google and emial body text “Retail industry IT trends”. I got the following response. Anything I missed?

Hi Shankar Viswanathan,You just mailed us. But we’re not sure we’ve been introduced, so here goes:We’re Mixamail.Mixamail lets you access Twitter via e-mail. This is useful if you have e-mail but not Internet access (e.g. on your BlackBerry).You haven’t yet logged in, but you can still search for public tweets. Mail twitter@mixamail.com with a subject “Search whatever-you-want”. We’ll reply with tweets mentioning whatever-you-want.But if you log in at http://www.mixamail.com and give Shankar_V05@infosys.com access to your Twitter account, you can read and update tweets too.Enjoy!Mixamailhttp://www.mixamail.com/
Aditya Deo 3 Jan 2011 12:22 pm: Ohh! So it’s developed by you? This service is terrific! :) Thanks!
Yasuro 3 May 2011 11:00 am: Is your service working? It worked beautifully with the sample query in your article, but when I tried “who is Obama,” I got “No search results.”
Yasuro 3 May 2011 9:52 am: Great service, Shankar. I have unlimited email on my Android cell phone, but not Internet in general. So this is precisely the kind of service I was looking for. I am wondering if you could create a separate email address for this, e.g., google@mixamail.com, so we can skip the step of inputting “Google” in the subject field. The email app my cell phone carrier supplies is flawed, so you cannot automatically fill the subject field. Because of the non-standard-conforming behavior of the email server of the carrier, that is the only app that you can use to send and/or receive emails; I cannot use any other email client. :( I’d appreciate it if you could consider it. Thank you. Yasuro

Shortening sentences

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 08:16:37 +0000

When writing Mixamail, I wanted tweets automatically shortened to 140 characters – but in the most readable manner.

Some steps are obvious. Removing redundant spaces, for example. And URL shortening. I use bit.ly because it has an API. I’ll switch to Goo.gl, once theirs is out.

I tried a few more strategies:

Replace words with short forms. “u” for “you”, “&” for and, etc.
Remove articles – a, an, the
Remove optional punctuation – comma, semicolon, colon and quotes, in particular
Replace “one” with “1”, “to” or “too” with 2, etc. “Before” becomes “Be4”, for example
Remove spaces after punctuations. So “a, b” becomes “a,b” – the space after the comma is removed
Remove vowels in the middle. nglsh s lgbl wtht vwls.

How did they pan out? I tested out these on the English sentences on the Tanaka Corpus, which has about 150,000 sentences. (No, they’re not typical tweets, but hey…). By just doing these, independently, here is the percentage reduction in the size of text:

2.0%	Remove optional punctuations – comma, semicolon, colon and quotes
2.2%	Remove spaces after punctuations. So “a, b” becomes “a,b”
3.3%	Replace words with short forms. “u” for “you”, “&” for and, etc.
3.3%	Replace “one” with “1”, “to” or “too” with 2, etc.
6.7%	Remove articles – a, an, the
18.2%	Remove vowels in the middle

Touching punctuations doesn’t have much impact. There aren’t that many of them anyway. Word substitution helps, but not too much. I could’ve gone in for a wider base, but the key is the last one: removing vowels in the middle kills a whopping 18%! That’s tough to beat with any strategy. So I decided to just stop there.

The overall reduction, applying all of the above, is about 22%. So there’s a decent chance you can type in a 180-character tweet, and Mixamail.com will still tweet it intelligibly.

I had one such tweet a few days ago. I try and stay well within 140, but this one was just too long.

The Lesson: If you're writing an app (or building anything), find a use for yourself. There's no better motivation -- and it won't ever be a wasted effort.

That was 156 characters. It got shortened to:

Lesson If u're writing app (or building anything) find use 4 yourself. There's no better motivation -- & it won't ever be wasted ef4t.

Perfectly acceptable.

You may notice that Mixamail didn’t have to employ vowel shortening. It makes the most readable shortenings first, checks if it’s within 140, and tries the next only if required.

If anyone has a simple, readable way of shortening Tweets further, please let me know!

Comments

408wij 11 Nov 2010 5:17 am:
1. Are removing punctuation and removing spaces after punctuation mutually exclusive, or do you have a rule for determining which punctuation is optional?
2. You give the example of “before” going to “be4.” It could go to “b4” with the rule that the “be” and “de” prefixes reduce to “b” and “d.”
3. You have “you’re” going to “u’re.” You could expand “you’re” to “you are” and then reducing to “u r.”
4. For readability, I suggest preserving the first and last letters of words. (Compare with http://www.boingboing.net/2003/09/14/scrambled-words-are-.html) E.g., reduce “English” to “Englsh” instead of to “nglsh.” Finally, I the point of the 140-char limit is to limit the scope of a tweet to a simple thought. Shortening words is cheating. But, if you’re going to cheat, I suggest an unshortener for the receiver of tweets. 408wij
Arthi 10 Nov 2010 12:38 pm: I prefer tweetlonger.com. Tweets look much better when they don’t go through reductions.
V 26 Nov 2010 8:36 am: I am writing something similar. Will share once done. But my preliminary attempts brought down the characters atleast 10% lesser than this. For eg. You have got 133 chars , whereas my system results in 123. I shall implement some more NLP techniques and bring it down to an acceptable level without sacrificing the semantics
iwebtalk 11 Jan 2011 8:41 pm: I use utwitmore.com .. no need to worry about 140 characters

Twitter via e-mail

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:24:45 +0000

Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do.

So, obviously, I wrote one this weekend: Mixamail.com.

I’ve kept it as simple as I could. If I send an email to twitter@mixamail.com, it replies with the latest tweets on my Twitter home page. If I mail it again, it replies with new tweets since the last email.

I can update my status by sending a mail with “Update” as the subject. The first line of the body is the status.

I can reply to tweets. The tweets contain a “reply” link that opens a new mail and replies to it.

I can subscribe to tweets. Sending an email with “subscribe” as the subject sends the day’s tweets back to me every day at the same hour that I subscribed. (I’m keeping it down to daily for the moment, but if I use it enough, may expand it to a higher frequency.)

Soon enough, I’ll add re-tweeting and (update: added retweets on 27 Oct) a few other things. I intend keeping this free. Will release the source as well once I document it. The source code is at Github.

Give it a spin: Mixamail.com. Let me know how it goes!

For the technically minded, here are a few more details. I spent last night scouting for a small, nice, domain name using nxdom. I bought it using Google Apps for $10. The application itself is written in Python and hosted on AppEngine. I use the Twitter API via OAuth and store the user state via Lilcookies. The HTML is based on html5boilerplate, and has no images.

Comments

Jayson 26 Oct 2010 6:41 pm: Pretty neat work! What was the time taken for this to be done?
S Anand 26 Oct 2010 6:46 pm: Let’s see… 5 hours on Sunday to get the Twitter API working… 4 hours yesterday to get the user management sorted… about 5 hours today to get the UI done. About 14 hours so far.
Aravinda 26 Oct 2010 6:52 pm: Very nice app :)
Praveen 26 Oct 2010 8:03 pm: Awesome app.
pgt 27 Oct 2010 11:25 pm: have you checked out posterous.com , they do twitter among other things
Rockey 27 Oct 2010 11:31 pm: Tussi Great ho !
Amitesh 2 Nov 2010 7:23 am: Hey, I am not a techie but this application looks sure value to me. Great work!

mixamail on S Anand

Google search via e-mail

Comments

Shankar V 29 Dec 2010 5:36 am:AnandI tried to send an email to this id with subject Google and emial body text “Retail industry IT trends”. I got the following response. Anything I missed?

Shortening sentences

Comments

Twitter via e-mail

Comments