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Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to displays live feed of latest twitpics. (pingwire.com)

102 points by allang ↗ HN
As usual, when your mind races at night, it's tough to sleep. Instead of tossing and turning, I decided to quickly bang out some code using twitter's search API that displays the latest images posted to twitpic.<p>There's probably so many places I could go with this - so, any ideas for enhancements?

50 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread
kevinherron
I know it would take away from the "liveness" of it but it would be neat if you could wait for an entire rows worth of images to appear and have a smooth animation that pushed everything down to make room for that new row.

The way each image is added currently is a little "jarring" visually...

Cool though :-)

derefr
I suggest they fall in groups of four, join together, and disappear :)
migpwr
It's probably pretty difficult to filter but there were some serious NSFW pics coming across my screen there. Just a heads up for anyone else who's still at their office.
dthakur
Speaking of which, my idea was to use the current tech in detecting nude images to create a site like this that ONLY displays the NSFW pics from twitpic.

Lost interest in it though.

jacquesm
what tech is that ? I'm very interested in that!
dthakur
There are a lot of academic papers on detecting things like skin-tones, common shapes etc in photos.

Sorry I don't have any links off-hand but search for nude image detector or porn detector etc and you should run into some PDFs.

I remember reading one by google guys about how they implemented the safe search filter for image search. It all comes down to identifying some features of the photo and running in through a trained ANN or SVM.

dkokelley
This sounds like a job for Mechanical Turk.
eru
Too expensive. Make it a game instead.
zeeone
Man, you're crazy ... I can't stop watching. Now I also can't sleep.
marram
You guys must not be in North America, because it is 4:25 p.m here.
notaddicted
That is a pretty good reason not to be able to sleep ;).

It would be cool to be able to click on one to mark it as interesting, and then also see the feed of ones that people mark as interesting (over a longer timespan.)

allang
I'm in New York, but I posted it this afternoon from work. There are no guys, it's just me and a little bit of code I wrote in 30 minutes, or 40 minutes tops. I had never seen picfog or any other service - this was just something I wrote because I couldn't sleep.
quizbiz
care to teach others the process from start to finish? A tutorial based on something similar would be oh so helpful.
Periodic
That's pretty neat.

However, I can't help asking myself if this real adds any real value to the world. Not that it has to. It's like mental candy. Pleasing, but ultimately lacking in substance.

kirubakaran
Does everything have to "add real value"?

Anyway, this did add value to the guy who wrote it: He had fun doing it.

I've been thinking a lot about how one can differentiate between art and random shit. Once possibile filter I thought of was: 'Did it make the creator or the audience happy?' But even this doesn't work. Tolstoy disagrees with me on his very first point. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

lpgauth
Looks like twitpic.com is having some problems...

"502 Bad Gateway nginx/0.6.35"

brown9-2
I'm getting 403 Forbidden's on all requests at this point
tlrobinson
Heh, as I was watching the images go by TwitPic went down. 502 Bad Gateway.

Hope that wasn't your fault ;)

allang
I think it was. Twitpic emailed me asking to start caching. I may have killed twitpic.
rmason
In one word - addictive ;<)
shivam14
Would be nice to have a customizable update timer or a way to slow down the stream.

It appears that some users do not fully grasp the fact that twitter (and related apps) is much more "open" than facebook. Some of the pictures seem pretty private.

grinich
How much have you made off the ads thus far?
cesare
Which ads?
iheartmemcache
I had to view the source to figure out what he was talking about. There are Google Ads; I didn't see them either (are you using Adblock Plus, also?).
cesare
I'm not using Adblock or anything similar (I'm on Safari 4.0.2 on Mac, btw).

I see some code related to google ads in the source but they're not showing on the page.

Maybe the code is just a placeholder.

kngspook
It shows up for me. (OS X 10.5.7, FF 3.5)
cesare
Now I see them too.
mahmud
It usually takes a view or two for the ad network to "learn" you. This usually happens with smaller networks though, google should know who you are by now (assuming you have been to other adsense enabled sites.)
fortes
Neat -- watch out though, can be NSFW depending on what people are posting.
taitems
Woah I don't know what I expected when I clicked this link, but definitely not upskirts.
slig
Really nice to see a modern (kind of) foundphotos.net
kngspook
What language did you write it in?
kngspook
I'm seeing the same pics over and over; any idea what that's from?
jacquesm
another suggestion, hash on the image, keep a list of the last 100 images, if an image re-appears drop it.
philfreo
This would be really useful if you could filter by subject (search term or hash tag). It'd be a great way to see pictures of a live conference or news event as it was unfolding (to go along with http://almost.at/)
newsio
It is addictive. Simple, but addictive.
stanleydrew
looks like twitpic has shut out requests from pingwire's ip?
jacquesm
I think it has to do with a referer check, if you copy the links without referring to pingwire it still works.

Pingwire really is mostly javascript, the site is a simple container to deliver that javascript to your browser which will then do the rest of the work all by itself.

It also seems the block isn't perfect, if you let it run long enough some pictures will make it through.

brown9-2
Don't think it's referrer based - copying and pasting the URL into a completely seperate browser instance still results in 403s for me.
jacquesm
that's weird, it works for me.

(not the image source but the link)

Btw, it's working again.

jazzychad
I can't see the site (getting 403), but I wrote a live TwitPic viewer for TweetGrid several months ago at http://tweetgrid.com/twitpicgrid - you can filter by search term or hashtag or whatever, or you can just watch the full stream come in.
matthewking
I've just seen Stephen Fry tweet this, and he has 650k~ followers, looks like its gone viral.. not bad for a nights work.
buckwild
Would you mind posting the source code (or emailing it to me)? I'm interested in seeing how you coded it (not to mention structured it). My background in developing web applications is relatively weak.

But if you'd like to keep it to yourself, I can understand...no pressure.

boatmeme
Try http://twitcaps.com - More like 3 sleepless nights of work. But, it does support all major Twitter image hosts and allows searches / filters / captures / location aware, etc.