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Ask HN: review my Twitter app game, Twabble

2 points by djb_hackernews ↗ HN
http://www.playtwabble.com . It's a point system game based on the vocabulary you use in your status updates. Points are awarded like Scrabble.

I built it to learn Python and Django and also as a resume builder (I am looking for a software dev job...). I didn't build it to showcase my web design skills. It uses Oauth to do sign in with Twitter, and because I know HN is weary my app requests write access but will only send a message to your stream if you explicitly tell it to.

6 comments

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spokey
I don't get it.

The description on the home page doesn't make the game clear to me, and isn't compelling enough to make me want to hand over my twitter credentials.

After poking around a bit I found the "Most Active Games" box, but the pages those links take me to don't really have any more information, just a tag cloud of evidently broken links.

I spent maybe 3 or 5 minutes there, and I still have no idea what Twabble is or what it does.

djb_hackernews
Yea, I need to change the verbiage. And I tried to augment it in the FAQ. But I agree it still is unclear. Admittedly there isn't much more to it besides tag clouds. If anyone actually uses it I'll probably add in some charts from the google api.

The broken links is because I was using an IntegerField to store the message ids, which are way bigger than integers. Don't know how I didn't catch that but it will be fixed soon. Thanks.

djb_hackernews
I've updated the home page to hopefully better describe the game play, which isn't much. I've also fixed the broken link issue, though I haven't fixed the old ones. One thing to note is I only require twitter sign on as a basic access control mechanism and so my bot will know who to follow. Once you are in with twitter you can create/delete and join/leave games.
rphlx
Cool idea. What are you using to access twitter? I've been using tweepy, it's been good to me so far.

P.S. There's an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar in firefox. Just sayin.

djb_hackernews
I am using oauth-python-twitter. I didn't hear about tweepy until about a week ago, I would definitely have gone with it if I had known. It's nice and clean.

I am in firefox 3.0, and no horizontal scroll bar. I don't know what would cause that...