2009-08-09
Simon Willison’s Twitter client
I went through pages of history so you don’t have to. Sounds like it’d be pretty easy to copy.
Finally broke down and wrote my own stupid twitter client on the train… it does groups! (July 3rd)
@rboulton as a matter of fact I did :) mongodb + about 100 lines of Python (July 3rd)
Having your own Twitter client that saves tweets to a persistent store is AWESOME - group support, search over just people you follow… (July 4th)
my dumb home grown Twitter client is now powered by djng! (July 4th)
@TrevorGerzen it’s really simple - just a script that dumps tweets in to mongodb every 60 seconds, and a one-page Django app that shows them (July 4th)
@rboulton @cackhanded haven’t decided if I’ll release my client yet (July 6th)
@JimPurbrick my custom Twitter client now archives everything from people I follow (in MongoDB), it’s a really useful feature (July 8th)
Twitter and friend-only searches
Roo Reynolds posted a pair of photos (1, 2) to highlight a feature he says Twitter needs: searching the updates only of people you follow.*
I don’t disagree, but Twitter might find implementing followed-only search difficult. This is because Summize (the acquired company that provides their search functionality) is somewhat disconnected from Twitter proper: it still has own domain (which stayed up on Thursday), for example. Incidentally, this disjoint nature means that people who run private (hi!) aren’t indexed at all.
It’s also why deleted posts aren’t deleted on search, but then another failing actually saves you: the search index is only goes back a few weeks.
Probably the only practical solution in the short term, given I doubt Twitter have the time or inclination to fix these issues, is to fix it yourself. Simon Willison has started running his own local DB, largely for search purposes. It’s tempting to do the same.
* I commented over there, but thought it was worth pulling out for a larger audience.
