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

22 points by dbuthay ↗ HN
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?

http://friendtweets.heroku.com/

17 comments

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Blankwood
What do you get if you win? :)
dbuthay
I can choose between a Nexus S or an IPad.
Blankwood
How long did it take you to build it? Can't you use Twitter search to do this though?
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.
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.

santip
Twitter seems to be over capacity, that's probably preventing your timeline from being indexed.
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.

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?
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.
senko
You can get around the twitter's search limit, by requesting their timelines, which goes up to 3200 of their tweets - you can get 200 tweets per API call.

I believe http://snapbird.org/ does this for "searching beyond Twitter history".

But if you try this on all of your friends, it soon becomes very, very slow. Eg if you have 100 people you follow, and they all have ~2000 tweets (or that's how deep you want to go), you'll have 1000 API requests. That's for one users' friends timeline.

dbuthay
I'm doing something like that on my app. Even requesting 200 tweets per API call, it takes a while to index when you have lots of friends.
fara
add img {border:none} to your css
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...
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.