The Killer Twitter App Hasn’t Been Built Yet | Hacker News Reader

The Killer Twitter App Hasn’t Been Built Yet

john-sheehan.com

20 pointsjohns21 comments

This is a great start, but I don't want this for JUST twitter. Twitter is ONE source of "information" I get. I have a feedreader, imap email, facebook notifications, financial info,twitter replies/messages, and probably even more. I just want it all pushed to me, with "iphone push notifications" for the important things: email, dms, @ replies, certain words I designate,etc. Do you have any idea the amount of time you'll save me or someone else who is consuming tons of info? With all this talk of "push/real time,etc.", I'm still doing a shitload of "pulling", which is complete bullshit. And YES, I will pay you for the app. My credit card sits in my wallet everyday waiting to be taken out for this exact purpose.

I think what you are describing is the intention of gnip - http://www.gnip.com/

Yes gnip rocks, but it seems they provide the business service for companies to provide this. I want an app as a consumer. Gnip could build this.

A feed reader is already an aggregator. This is a meta-aggregator--and when people come out with different flavors of this type of thing, we'll have meta-meta-aggregators.

This is an amalgamation of lots of different Twitter apps. More importantly, it's an amalgamation of this guy's favourite Twitter apps. It's his killer app. However, many other people will want a different set of apps in their killer app.

What this guy is really saying is, "Build me a custom version of this thing." Sounds like enterprise software.

Some progress may me made by rolling up some of the popular/complementary apps and, thus, satisfy a large enough group of users.

My killer twitter app idea: Search twitter for genuine requests "I need" "I want" and match with service providers. If someone tweets "I need a new car", a highest bidder, (perhaps carmax.com in this case) will have a reply sent automatically with a link to a landing page automatically customized to welcome that twitter user/potential buyer.

This is so obvious to me, but I'm no engineer. I would love to partner with an engineer to make this a reality.

Everything seems like an obviously good programming idea to a non-programmer.

Programming is like magic. You should learn some.

I'm having trouble getting started with Rails and Ruby but I am tinkering with php/javascript. edit: I found http://tryruby.hobix.com/ !

I'd thought about building this but threw it out when I figured I couldn't get my various devices to talk through it to Twitter. Computer, sure that's easy: fix your host to api.twitter.com, but fixing all the iPhone apps to point to this service instead of api.twitter.com? Not likely.

Unless you harnessed the existing applications then it wouldn't be useful.

>No more multi-device API limitations getting in your way.

I'm guessing api limitations are exactly why it doesn't exist

But if you only have one central service hitting the Twitter API your account can max out the API limit but still update multiple devices.

To some extent solving a similar (albeit much larger) problem was what made Summize valuable, no?

You can request that Twitter "bless" your app so that it will not have the 100 request per hour that everbody else gets. This makes API limitations a non-issue for any serious developer.

Is this GNIP.com

Google Wave?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall Wave was presented as a way to collaborate with people you knew to some extent. I follow a lot of people on Twitter that don't know I exist. Same concept (real-time distribution) though. Maybe Twitter is just the biggest Wave.

Spec out what you want, and how much you will pay for it, and I will build this for you.

$10/month. Negotiable. :)

As a subscription fee?

Yeah I would pay for a subscription to a service like the one I described.

Okay, send an email of exactly what you want to zackster/gmail/com. I'll think it through and we can work something out so you can have your killer app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com