That, along with the fact that I've had lots of fun on Twitter during big events (like the elections), made me think that it'd be a fun hack to put together a Twitter playback site.
So last night and tonight I threw together http://www.twitterplayback.com. Check it out an let me know what you think!
Here is an excerpt from Twitter's branding guidelines:
Don't:
* Use Twitter in the name of your website, application or product.
* Register a domain containing twitter, misspellings, transliterations or similar variations thereof.I can understand that it was fun for you to build, no offence - but I don't see the value in things that piggyback on those two services. There are so many real challenges out there...
There, I had to say it (not impressed).
As you said, this is for fun. It's certainly not a business or something I'm going to take much further, so the long-tem viability of Twitter's platform doesn't matter that much to me.
That said, it is where the people are, and I haven't found anything that let's me feel the pulse of the global online community as well. As I said, I think Twitter's a blast during a big live event, and that's why I built this.
I agree. Sorry to sound "negative" - it's probably because I'm one of the people that "don't get" twitter/facebook in the first place.
*Update: I was looking at submissions about Certician, your tool for monitoring your SSL certificates. As comparison, I find that so much more useful, even if the website it's no longer live.
It's interesting, and I've gotten into a few amusing discussions, but in the end I still "don't get" it. People talk about Twitter being this exciting place where they have all these discussions with all sorts of people, but I just don't see how.
I'm probably a lost cause for doing anything more than consuming and making the occasional quip, but I'm curious: Is there some common point that everyone hits where suddenly they're fully engaged and Twitter stops feeling disjointed? Is it just that I check Twitter like once or twice a day, and I need to try harder?
How about instead of waiting and controlling the time speed etc. the app itself keeps playing the tweets along with its duration from the last tweet: "after 2 hours", "after 4 days", "after few mins" etc.
That ways I am never waiting for something to appear instead am constantly engaged.
Maybe two modes would be useful?
Feel free to fork: https://github.com/bretwalker/twitterplayback
Replay of movie commentary: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=from%3Aaimeemann+OR+from%3...
Tonight's TV: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=dancing%20stars
Social media contest: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23GOU100
Sports: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23iubb
The page is (hastily) written using JavaScript, so feel free to take a peek. There's a lot more that can be added to this -- most notably, date ranges, but I think it's pretty fun right now. Oh, and the maximum number of results Twitter will let me have per query is 1500, so keep that in mind.
Thoughts/suggestions:
• I expected there to be a rollback option, perhaps via the '-' button. (Didn't expect to have sticky varying faster-than-realtime rates instead.)
• A slider/timeline-scrubber would probably be ideal, with indicator ticks everywhere there's an upcoming tweet. Then you can either 'play' real-time, and drag-'seek' to any interesting point forward or back, and fairly easily re-sync to an approximate minute after out-of-band DVR ops. (Also, 'next'/'prev' buttons would be more natural accelerated navigation to me, rather than the steppable-FF-rate.)
• Would benefit from explicit 'permalink'/sharing-of-well-crafted-range-query support. Such permalinks could be decorated with more contextual metadata (eg: name of program).
• Does Hulu work in a frame? (Or more generally: permalink metadata mentioned above could include recommended links to legitimate playback sources.)
• You might let people layer in their own lagged tweets by assisting them in using a hashtag offset convention. For example, "#lizanddick #11-25t0h8m blah blah blah".
There were a few startups attempting to enable synchronous group TV-event watching in past years... but I suspect they all suffered from the rise of DVRs among exactly their online-immersed target audience. Leveraging Twitter and allowing a blend of synchrony or asynchrony might work better.
Good luck!
Cool project. The sample you have makes it easy to see the uses. It would be cool if people could submit "fun" or good examples of great timelines. I think that would bring the social aspect into the project. Most people won't have the time to put together the criteria to produce the "query" so having a set of samples would be helpful in gaining traction