You may have noticed the Twitter “tweets” in my side bar. Lately, I’ve been playing with Twitter quite a bit and just as I was thinking about checking out the developer API, jimkukral tweeted that it would be nice if someone could come up with an application to email him tweets from a select list of twitter users, possibly as much as hourly. I love a challenge, so I DMed (direct messaged) him for some detail and then started looking at the API docs. The API is really easy, so I had a test script pulling information pretty quickly. The next day, I had a rough model of the application. I’ve spent the past week (about 30 minutes a day) tweaking the scripts, getting the cron jobs set up, designing a site, and testing. I am proud to finally announce the launch of TwitterTech.com.
TwitterTech.com is built around Jim’s idea, but will also encompass any other tools that I can come up with. I already have another tool challenge from Ian Fernando, and I’ll be working on that next. Now that the framework is in place, new tools should be easy. If you have any tool challenges for me, let me know.
The Email Feed
Jim’s idea was pretty simple, really, and a great idea. Enter a comma-delimited list of twitter screen names and your email address and get a list of their recent tweets. Jim had mentioned the possibility of this emailing him every hour, but I know from experience that people like their choices. I decided to allow a user to choose to have updates sent every half hour, hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, or once per day. I also opted to only display NEW tweets from that user, and the tweets are displayed in the order you enter the users into your list. Management is all handled via a very basic web interface. I wanted to keep it really simple.
More tools coming
I don’t want to say too much about the new tools I’m working on, but I will say that there’s a lot in store. I looked at a lot of what other developers are offering and it seems like most are offering applications that mostly all do the same thing. I want to build stuff people actually need and that isn’t already built. Again, if you have a tool in mind, let me know. I should have the next tool or two out in the next week.
Invite a friend
I’ve seen far too many web projects crunch under the weight of their own success. I don’t want to host an application that has so many users that it becomes unusably slow for all of them. For now, I’ve implemented an invite-only policy. This is just so I can keep a leash on the user-base. If you want an invite, just twitter “@joetech TwitterTech invite, please” and I will send you one. Additionally, once you’ve validated your email address, you get a few invites that you can hand out to friends.
I have a couple other projects on the table right now, but this one has been the focus for this week so far, and I hope some of you find it useful.
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