Congratulations! With your tool, I can finally understand some of my twitter-centric friends and acquaintances.
And most importantly, Thank you for demonstrating the power of a well-executed concept (and showing that it is possible to build something interesting and useful in a weekend.
I think it is a good idea. Contact http://twitter.com/help/contact and let them know. They usually post twitter tools on their blog, they might post your tool.
Less useful but related idea: twitterfight. When two people send a bunch of direct messages to one another, that suggests a potential fight. So one day I hacked together a yahoo! pipe to highlight twitter battles. The trouble was that polite conversations kept getting through my filters. Short of manually cleansing the data, I concluded there was no utility. Smart work, Ben, on fixing the larger problem of twitter threading.
I'd like a page that lists all the updates from those that I'm following (like a standard Twitter client) but with a link to expand the conversation around each update
Very cool. One thing I noticed is that it has "all" messages posted, including ones the user may have deleted off of their Twitter feed... Seems that once it is sent out into the Twittosphere, you can't actually retract the message, even by "deleting" it. So, this makes for an interesting way to see everything ;)
yeah, unfortunately it is. At present it uses the same threading algorithm as twitter does, namely: if there's an @username in a tweet, assume it's responding to the last tweet of that user. I may look to do something smarter down the road.. we'll see.
Time decay might be a factor, but I think you'll get better results than making everything be a reply to the last update from that user. Once you find out what the magical N number is you can throw that in as well.
