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TwitrView: A Small Announcement

When I first started using twitter for Ume, I thought it might be kind of cool if people did interviews over twitter. The character limit is an interesting constraint, there is a real time aspect, and the person getting interviewed can review an answer. For myself, I enjoy handling email interviews because you have a chance to edit your thoughts, which means readers get a more interesting and informative response. With that in mind I set out to write a crawler of sorts to monitor a set of twitter accounts and compile an interview between some people.

The idea for a crawler type of application was also partly stemmed from my desire to get more comfortable with threads. In addition to my own perceived concurrency issues, I started playing with BerkleyDB, and later, Tokyo Cabinet. In the end though, simplicity won and I dropped the persistence and just do everything on demand.

The result is TwtrView! All it does is pull the last 50 tweets from the users you enter and see what messages include @replies to any of those users. This makes it possible to see an interview as well as find conversations folks might be having. It actually has been somewhat useful because when I see a conversation someone might be having, I enter the two usernames and I can see where things came from.

There are definitely some limits. I'm using on twitter account for the API calls so if something doesn't work, it might have had too many requests. If people use this, then I'm sure OAuth will become much higher on my list of things to do. Also, the requests are made from my server, so it is very much network bound in terms of processing.

I hope someone else might find it useful. If you have any issues feel free to send me an email or comment below.

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