

My project: Twitterate: Rate stuff via Twitter - jraines
http://twitterate.com

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maryrosecook
I implemented a similar idea a few weeks ago and called it
<http://www.tweviews.com> I like your implementation: the RSS feed and the
grouping of items being rated into the Hot Stuff category are both cool.

My set-up is similar: reply tweets sent to @tweviews However, I send them on
as normal tweets to the tweviews Twitter account. This means that if people
want tweviews, they can just follow the Twitter account.

Content-wise, I was shooting for a different slant: I also have a cron-job set
up that pulls in the reply tweets, but I moderate them and only send on the
good ones.

I'm still tweaking the format of the tweviews. Currently, it is "@tweviews
thing, artist ... review" I display the latest five tweets in a sidebar on my
blog (link in my profile) and automatically link the "thing, artist" part up
to a Google search.

Anyway, in summary, I really like Twitterate. Nice job.

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jraines
Moderation,reposting to Twitter, and linking are interesting ideas -- I hope
you don't mind if I take them as suggestions and potentially implement them
down the road.

What language/framework did you use to build tweviews?

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maryrosecook
Please do!

I haven't got much time to work on Tweviews at the moment - I did it as a
little diversionary side-project-burst-of-creation thing. My main focus at the
moment is my start-up.

I also used Ruby/Rails. I find projects like this to be both ideally suited
to, and hampered by, the use of RoR. They're nice and quick to code, but
setting up the hosting environment is a time-consuming bore.

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iamwil
You two should work together, maybe. It's usually pretty hard to say, 'hey I
need a co founder' when there isn't even a shared interest.

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shawndrost
I think you've stumbled onto something genuinely interesting: twitter's users
are the kind of verbose early adopter that write reviews, and you're using an
interface they're already familiar with. Furthermore, if I understand twitter
correctly (not a user), you've got a viral spread mechanism built in, in that
all followers of twitterate users will see the @rating and wonder what it
means (though it would help you if the tag was @twitterate).

If you're interested in pursuing that, you should rewrite twitterate.com as a
destination site for people looking for ratings. It'll be depressingly bad
now, but it will expose what you need to do to make it work. Or you could
leave it as the entertaining toy it is. Good work in any case!

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jraines
Gentlemen: I give you the Internet's first and only way to rate things on a 1
to 5 scale.

To use, just send a tweet reply to @rating in this form:

"@rating 5 "Thing Being Rated" and some comments here"

This is a pretty rough draft -- wish I could say it was a weekend project but
it took a few weekends; but it was fun and I learned a lot about Rails, and
Rails deployment especially.

So, here's the releasing early part. Should I iterate or abandon? What
features would make this cool?

Note: the part of the app that scrapes Twitter is an hourly cron job, so if
you don't see your rating immediately, that's why.

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mechanical_fish
It's cute. A fine beginner Rails project.

First thing I wish for, 5 seconds after hitting this page: links. I want the
thing being rated to be a link that I can click on. Try detecting URLs, and/or
using Google's mighty I'm Feeling Lucky function.

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utnick
awesome! congrats

I vote iterate. I think some sweet real time graphs and charts would be cool.
but i like the simple look also.

One suggestion: Speed up the cron, i need instant gratification

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glasner
You could also replace the cron job with a Jabber client to receive the
@rating messages.

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jraines
that's interesting -- I didn't know Twitter supported that; I'll definitely
check that out and implement it once I grok it

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tonyvt2005
Great job! Nice and simple.

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hooande
Great idea, jraines

