Twitter, DarkStar & Telescope – Delivering Sentiment to an Equities Broker

Cloud Event Processing has moved off the white board and into the real world of, ‘hey, we’ve got customers!’

Twitter

When building a system like DarkStar, one can always run into difficulties – how does one demo a cloud based, distributed event processing system incorporating streaming map/reduce, complex event processing, and event driven pattern matching agents to prospective customers?  Our background includes very high velocity feeds, like equities and option market data feeds, but using those for demo purposes can be difficult.  So we decided on using Twitter.  We decided to use Twitter because we could access tweets via a feed, Twitter is relevant, and using DarkStar to analyze the relatively unstructured contents of a tweet seemed like a good way to strut our stuff.

Little Did We Know

Our demo has turned into a lot more than just a demo.  In addition to analyzing the twitter stream for things like most popular links, #hash tags, mentions, etc, we thought it might be cool to analyze the sentiment expressed in tweets relative to certain topics.  So we went ahead and incorporated that into DarkStar.  Our first public display of this was calculating the sentiment, as expressed within Twitter, regarding VMware’s acquisition of RabbitMQ.  DarkStar gave the acquisition a ‘thumbs-up’ with a streaming sentiment rating of ~.45 – which is pretty darn good.  We’d been doing a lot of work in Ze Bunkah (our lab), but had yet to go public with any results or announcement.

What’s Going On In There?

While DarkStar is really good at consuming both structured and unstructured data and doing neat stuff with it, it’s not too good at displaying the results of its parallel ruminations in any other way than a streaming data feed.  So to help our customers find out what’s going on inside of DarkStar, we began work on Telescope.  Telescope is our rich internet application, written predominantly in Flex.  Using DarkStar, customer’s can submit queries to our cloud, have DarkStar compute the results, and submit those results back to Telescope for further manipulation and visualization.

Another First for CEP and Cloud Event Processing

Although other firms certainly have adapters for submitting queries and obtaining results from Twitter, this is the first application of complex event processing to sentiment analysis that uses Twitter to deliver results.  At least as far as we know of.  And we’re excited about it.  Almost as excited as the customers we’re dealing with.  I’m sure that once we’re up and running that we’ll have some customer specific results to share.

Until then, thanks for reading!