

Ask HN: feedback on my app - search your Twitter timeline - dbuthay

I'm a developer at IndexTank, we are having an internal contest similar to the public one we had with Heroku a few days ago. My entry is an app to search your personal twitter timeline, something I've been wanting Twitter to do but for some reason they don't. Does anyone find this useful?<p>http://friendtweets.heroku.com/
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Tichy
Definitely something that I have been wanting for years. Not sure about your
implementation, though. You are aware that twitter search only goes back a
couple of weeks? Somehow I couldn't find the things I expected to find.

Should I be more patient waiting for results (in case your app loads all my
friend's tweets incrementally)? Then maybe you should display a spinner or
something.

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dbuthay
I'm fetching your timeline, you friends timelines, and indexing them with
IndexTank.

It's incremental, so it may take a while. There's a limited number of allowed
twitter API calls per hour, so in case you have lots of friends it'll take
some time to have them all indexed.

About the status, there's a status bar on the upper right corner.

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santip
And you keep them even after they fall from Twitter search or the user
timeline right, so eventually you'll be able to find tweets that are otherwise
unreachable right?

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dbuthay
I keep all the tweets. So the answer is Yes, you'll be able to find tweets
that twitter's search does not let you find.

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booduh
I think it would be cool to have some "mood" analysis. The app tells me, "you
started as angry, swung to calm, and are now worried. Based on current trends,
tomorrow you will be happy; plan to surf."

I'm searching with text, yes, but what I'm really looking for is insight.

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bmarashi
Very cool! Can this thing search my Twitter Favorites? I used Twitter
Favorites like a bookmarking system vs. ReadItLater. I often search for things
I want to archive and stick in my database or then read later...

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Blankwood
What do you get if you win? :)

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dbuthay
I can choose between a Nexus S or an IPad.

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Blankwood
How long did it take you to build it? Can't you use Twitter search to do this
though?

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dbuthay
It took me about 3 days to build it. It's my first ruby / heroku app, so I
learned a lot. Sinitter (<http://sinitter.moocode.com/>) saved me a lot of
coding, though.

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fara
add img {border:none} to your css

