I like that it grabs events out, instead of just trending words. How did you manage that if you don't mind sharing? I'm a big fan of tools, especially cool ones so thanks for showing great ideas can be made real in ones spare time if they keep plugging!
Events are suggested by users (the little + button in the lower left). Currently, I approve/reject them by hand to keep it focused. Eventually, I'll have a public voting system.
May I ask, how much work went into it? (compared to what you'd imagine it'd have taken you to do from scratch, using jQuery or something?) Because it's the slickest web-app I've seen in…well, ever!
Well, quite a bit, I guess... but not THAT much. I'm a full time freelance developer and I made this in my spare time over the past 3-4 months. I had the idea a year ago, but you know how that goes!
Congratulations. This is remarkable.
What's the backend like?
The index.html and Cappuccino javascript are served from an EC2 server and the new content is continuously loaded from sequential files on Amazon S3 via JSONP (0.json, 1.json, 2.json, etc.).
Views, suggesting events, and adding followees are sent to php pages on EC2 with MySQL.
Just finished bouncing to all my favorite social sights and bumped almost.at When I'm jealous of a developers work, I actively promote said dev :D Great job, please keep on cookin' How many services can you pull in and grab info from? in the future google waves? Whatever you're using to identify events from the data deluge should be applicable to all real time web services. I'm very interested in the code used, and if you need any volunteers for specific APIs or problems give a hollar (my background is algorithm development + monte carlo analysis simulations/modeling mostly c++)