I was wondering what happened to Particls. They were definitely ahead of their time. - Corvida

@Corvida: Me too. I had high hopes for them at one time. - Sarah Perez

Interesting. I "signed up" for a few obscure work and business related terms just to see if any ever show up. - Craig Eddy

Track has been "back" since last July thanks to Dustin Sallings and Twitterspy. I wonder how Particls will get around the 20K/hr API call limit that's been giving Twitterspy fits lately. - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken: Twitterspy lets you use XMPP clients (http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008...), but Particls also lets you use Twitter itself to track keywords - similar to the original Twitter track feature. I was not aware Twitterspy does this (I don't think it does?). Please let me know if I'm wrong. - Sarah Perez

It doesn't matter... there are severe API limits on DMs - we are all just dancing around the API barriers. Particls will either a) get Twitter to unlimit them for $$$ OR b) bounce off the API limits the same way TwitterSpy, justSignal, SocialToo, etc do. - Brian Roy

Sarah: No, Twitterspy doesn't track via DM, although it'd be easy to add... if not for the fact that it's already hitting the API limit ceiling with ~900 users, and adding API calls to retrieve and send DMs would put it further into the red. If a DM interface is/was necessary for track to be declared "back", I guess you've got it now. I'm just a little jaded as every month or so there's been yet another service that gets promoted as the solution to the track problem, when they're certainly not the first. - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken I see. I have to say, though, this is the first solution I've been excited about thanks to Twitter DM integration. But as the article mentions, the API limits are a deal-breaker for everyone who tries to solve the Track problem. - Sarah Perez

Sarah: The article says "However, those who use an XMPP client will not have any issues." They will, if the service is at all successful. Twitter limits API calls to 20K/hr, so if each user is tracking one unique term, at 20K users you can only look for posts containing that term once an hour. That's not quite the "real time". There are ways to work around the limit, but you're basically "hacking" Twitter and working around their intent, which seems to be to prevent services like this from taking off. - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken: Aaaah, I see. I'll correct that now. Thanks for clarifying. - Sarah Perez

BTW, Twitterspy is open source, so anybody is free to fire up their own instance, which would certainly be one way to avoid the API limit. Maybe somebody would like to see if they can implement DM before Dustin can, eh? :-) http://dustin.github.com/twitter... - Ken Sheppardson

Watching your DMs works. I don't think delivery via DM could work for any real life userbase. Don't think of it as 20k users * 1 track == 1/hr. Think 1000 users * 1 track * 20 matches == 1/hr. Each individual delivery is now a scarce resource. - Dustin Sallings

I've been beta testing Particls for awhile and it's a great service. The DM limitation is a pain, especially for noisy or excessively large topic clusters, but really neat otherwise. - Jason Salas from FriendFeed MT Plugin