My project: Twitterate: Rate stuff via Twitter | Hacker News Reader

My project: Twitterate: Rate stuff via Twitter

twitterate.com

16 pointsjraines12 comments

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

Great job! Nice and simple.

Great idea, jraines

Reply on news.ycombinator.com