Twistori -- an experiment: discovering the feelings of our global consciousness (using twitter)

Twistori is an excellent example of blending art with human experience with a bit of technological black magic. I saw Eric Kastner give a talk at this year's RailsConf. It was a very intriguing session on microapps. Amy Hoy was in the audience but participated in the talk too.

Twistori was a micro-app, as was Spell with Flickr.

A micro-app is loosely designed as an application you design and build in one continuous period e.g. day (in Amy's case, she woke up one morning with this idea and worked with her husband all through the day and launched Twistori at the end of the day).

Twistori doesn't use Ruby on Rails. It's very lightweight on the backend (once every hour a cron job scrapes the latest Twitter chats containing those human emotives via Summize and a bit of clever javascript). Amy said that the colors were very deliberately chosen. The design was very deliberate - the thoughts that scroll off at the top of the screen - you can't scroll them back - they're ephemeral...

TwitterVision, another favorite of mine (coded in 4 hours by Ruby on Rails ninja David Troy), was just featured in the MOMA! (http://davetroy.blogspot.com/2007/10/moma-ny-selects-twitter...)