Show HN: Remote control your digital life from Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Remote control your digital life from Twitter

ctrltwit.com

26 pointsshaharsol31 comments

This reminded me directly of some mIRC Scripts. For example, if you had to change your nick, instead of using the private command `/nick newnick`, the script will give you a command you can use publicly on the channel, like `!nick`. So everyone can know twice that you're changing your nick. Also people who was using theses scripts used to change nicks every time they do something (eating, sleeping, going to work, ...) — and I always hated that because it was adding too much useless noise to IRC.

Now... this tool seems quite similar. Controlling your life should happen in secret - I don't want to know when you want to turn on the bulb in your toilets, I don't care how much space you have in your dropbox, …. All theses things are private matter.

Twitter is already full of useless noise, don't add more...

I kinda hear ya.

However - I always thought of twitter more as a communication protocol rather then a content app. I think twitter today is indeed already full of noise, and anyway there's no way to use it for content without curation tools.

Yes. Me too (hence the comparision with IRC/mIRC Scripts). However this kind of communication is just purely personal, I doubt anyone is interested in the fact that some friend wanted to know how full his dropbox was at some time in the day. Maybe the _result_ is interesting, but the trigger is not.

But if this works with direct messages, i'm buying it!

(edit: typos)

I have an example in another comment of how I can buy stock with it:

CTRL @robinhoodapp buy $FB USD100

And then apart from making the transaction I can start convert with my followers about this deal. What do u think of such scenario?

This example is cool— the trigger here is an useful information worth sharing. You need more of theses :)

Sure! By all means advertise to the world that you're about to make a trade. The HFT folks will love that.

Still though, surely all of this could be done over DMs?

yes but i wanted to keep the language natural. and if you naturally want to address dropbox on twitter, then you "@dropbox" them, and not "DM @ctrltwit do something with dropbox".

moreover i realized best usecases are replies to tweets (like liking an instagram photo, subscribing to a youtube channel, saving to pocket), and those wouldn't have been possible with DMs

Seems really interesting but not a huge fan of filling other peoples timelines with my Tweets controlling things. Or am I missing something?

There are two options: 1. if you reply to a tweet, or start a tweet with a '@', then most of your followers won't see it, unless they follow the replied to handler. so if i tweet a command to @instagram, only @instagram followers among my friends will see it, and there aren't many... 2. there will be cases where you want to engage a conversation around a command you send. for example:

CTRL @robinhoodapp buy $FB for USD100

So you buy FB stock AND you get your friends talking about it. Is it a good buy? a bad move?

A twitter-based app used to "like" Rihanna pictures on Instagram has also the credentials to spend huge amount of money ?

Out of topic, your page include logos of other large companies such as Linkedin, Dropbox, Instagram, is that legal? You can do that while they are not your customers/clients? Maybe what the logos mean is you can get your information from those company from your app. My first impression is those companies are your customers/clients.

I didn't consult with a lawyer or something... each company and their "branding" rules for API users and most allow to use the logo under certain restrictions that to my best understanding I don't break. Dropbox for instance had to approve the app before I could use the API and I bet they had a look at the website beforehand.

Nice, so you use an external service you have no control on to command external services you have no control on. Great !

Nice product, well executed. Reminds me of IMified a few years back.

If you want to build something similar yourself for your own app, it's very easy with the Wit API [1]

[1] https://wit.ai

Cool product and congratulations on launching. I kind of had a similar idea but never got round to building it.

What would put me off is the fact that I'd be cluttering up the feeds of those that follow me with things that should be done in private. Surely it would work better with DM's rather than public tweets?

Also I'm not sure how practical / time saving this will be. For example liking a photo on instagram using CtrlTwit doesn't really save me any time/hassle than just going straight to instagram.

However like I said it is pretty cool and I'll give it a try. You're presentation is great too.

Reminds me of Hubot http://hubot.github.com/

I suppose you could also use twitter DMs for notifications from services.

I built something more general months ago[0], but I found that using twitter to send commands adds a fair bit of overhead and noise to your twitter stream which is annoying.

It's a novel idea and the I see the appeal, but keeping down the clutter in the twitter stream is a key issue imo.

https://github.com/k0nserv/twicmd

I believe there was a similar product that did pretty much the same thing 3-4 years ago. Would anyone recall? What happened to them? I don't know if I would like controlling my personal stuff in a public environment.

Maybe IFTTT can react to specific tweets.

afaik you can't do that with IFTTT This is the most close trigger "New tweet by @me including @replies"

I bet they can, but then you'll need a separate recipe for each different command, and as a user you'll need to enable each command before you can use it. This way you just start by tweeting and it just works (after 1st oauth process that is, that is initiated as a reply to your tweet)

IMified? Was acquired by Voxeo in 2009. Was the same kind of tool, but on IM networks rather than Twitter.

It's a good idea but it's easier to click the link and do the action manually instead of typing the text and click reply. So there is absolutely no gain for me in using your product.

fair enough. i know it's for the keyboard savvy type.

Hey guys, I like your landing page a lot--what framework did you use for it? It looks like you used something out-of-the-box, not necessarily from scratch.

its from themeforest. pick your landing page here: http://themeforest.net/category/marketing/landing-pages (and then modify a little...)

Sorry but I don't see the use of relying on Twitter for requesting other APIs !

This just seems like a good way to annoy your followers.

Interesting product

Thx! I hope it can appeal to non-hackers as well as it involves typing commands, much like CLI IMO.

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