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Show HN: sweepstakes + Twitter = TweetStakes

7 points by sourc3 ↗ HN
A friend of mine and I were talking a while back and we realized that it would be cool to run some sweepstakes on Twitter. We put up a sign up page for a while to collect some emails and we got 200 sign ups.

Once we received some sign ups we got together about 2 weekends ago and we put together a web application that lets people create sweepstakes on Twitter by counting the mentions and picking winners etc.

I want to get your opinion on the site before we let those 200 people know that we are ready for beta. I would very much appreciate your feedback. Thanks in advance.

The url is: http://www.tweetstak.es

6 comments

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canatan01
I don't know if this exists but I think it's a nice idea. Two things though: 1. in my country (The Netherlands) there are laws surrounding sweepstakes and I guess in other countries also. Make sure you write something about that on your website. And maybe those laws even apply to you, so check that out. 2. why not make this idea broader and have Tweet Polls?
sourc3
That is a really good point that we will immediately implement in our Terms of Use.

2. That is a brilliant suggestion, I have a personal side project that is very much on this using mobile devices! This would be a great addition.

Thank you, this is exactly the type of feedback I was hoping for.

canatan01
I was going to sign up but the Twitter oauth asked me things to approve that I am wondering if you are really using or need. Like authorizing your web app to change my profile and read my DM. Is your web app changing profiles or reading DM? If not, skip that in the approval process.
sourc3
Honestly, I was not aware of that! We certainly don't need to modify your profile or read your direct messages.

The only thing we use it for is to check the mentions and follows so far.

Thank you for your help!

canatan01
What I don't know, is if you can choose the permissions. So maybe this is standard with Twitter oAuth. I know with the Facebook one you can choose which permissions you want to ask the user.