MSTP: My Twitter Based Reddit Style Board
I did this project last fall for an independent study that I took, and have been sitting on the code since. Since locked up code that no one (including myself) is using does even fewer people any good, I opened up the project on GitHub. Maybe this can be of use to someone. I really like the concept, but haven’t had the time to take it any further.
The source is here:
It’s a Rails project. Info from the README follows…
This is a proof of concept project built to support conversation threading based on Twitter hash tags. It was built to provide a saner forum for continuing Twitter hashtag conversations, which can be hard to follow and where lots of good info ends up getting lost.
MSTP (a terrible working title which stands for “MediaSpace Thought Pool”) attempts to improve the situation by watching Twitter for particular search terms, and then automagically starting a Reddit style thread with any tweet that matches those terms. The tweeter is notified that their tweet has been turned into a thread and given a link back to the board. Having an off-Twitter thread and board is meant to enable deeper, more persistant conversations based on ideas posted to Twitter.
I imagine the primary use case for this being classroom and conference conversations. Basically any situation where a bunch of folks are tweeting ideas about a similar topic, but having a hard time furthering specific conversations.
A live demo of the project can be seen here:
http://young-mountain-21.heroku.com/
TODO:
This was thrown together as a bit of a proof-of-concept hack over a week or two. So there are lots of improvements to be had/made for the project to be used in production:
- Twitter stream API. Tweets are currently pulled in via a cron job and a rake task which searches using the twitter search API. This could be made a lot better with the stream API.
- Security. Please audit this code before using it in production. It was quickly put together to prove a point, and I won’t vouch for its security.
- Search terms are currently hard coded. It needs an interface for defining terms.
- Reply tweets when a thread is spawned. If I remember correctly, this isn’t completely implemented and/or needs a Twitter account attached to it to work properly.
- Update code for Rails 3.
