It has been two years (almost to the date) since I first picked up "Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails" and I have finally released an app intended for the public that wasn't just a website for a client.  It's called "Twitterless", and the idea for it came from the realization that Twitter doesn't provide an option for you to be informed when someone stops following you.  When I realized this, I quickly coded up a prototype, ran the numbers, and realized it would be possible to create such an app despite the limitations of the Twitter API.

You would think that the hard part of creating a web app is coming up with the idea, but this really isn't the case.  Not only have I had dozens of my own ideas floating around in my head for the past two years, all my friends seem to have many ideas about what a great app would be too.  The idea is certainly not the hard part - it's the building of the app and growing of the userbase.  The idea in a way is just luck, so in some respects it's best to just pick one that seems simple enough to implement and run with it.  Hell, that's how Twitter was created after all.

So when the realization came to me and the path to creation seemed pretty straightforward, I immediately made the decision to launch a full-blown app regardless of its future potential.  It did one very important thing and that's solve an immediate problem that is common to many people.  For me that was enough.

I went to work adding the essential ingredients for a successful web2.0 app: cutsey and simple design, irritating yet somehow catchy name, etc.  The hardest part of creating a system that notifies users when followers stop following was getting around some of the limitations in the Twitter API.  Twitter limits requests to their API to 100 per hour, and moreover they only give you a user's list of followers in increments of 100.  Some sidestepping around this issue had to be put in place.

The dropped follower notifications is at the heart of the application, but I see it as more of a launching pad for other ideas I have in terms of Twitter.  With this follower data I can parse it in a variety of different ways, such as pie charts, line graphs, timelines, google maps, etc.  I also implemented a feature that allows you to search for a term in your followers posts, something that you can't specify in Twitter's own search (formerly Summize).  I see this data being important to anyone who sees Twitter as a marketing or customer service tool in any respect.

For instance, if you have a twitter feed for your web application with many followers, you may find it useful to be able to find out how many times the word "sucks" shows up in your followers posts.  Moreover, you may want to know where your users exist geographically.  And so on, you get the picture.  So as I think of these features I intend to implement them in Twitterless so that if some day the folks over at Twitter decide they do want to add notifiactions of dropped followers, I won't be blindsided.

One of these ideas is something I call address-bar-posting (I haven't thought of a better name yet).  Using twitterless, a user can bookmark a special link and assign a keyword (a firefox feature) to it which they can then pre-pend to any url they have in their browser's address bar to post that link.  Comments can prepend the link as well and it will all just get sent as one big post.  The best part, though, is that the URL gets automatically converted into a smaller url (ala TinyURL) so that the 140 character rate limit isn't hit as easily.  In reality, you don't even need to include the url at all.  You could just move focus to the address bar which usually highlights the whole URL and just type the keyword followed by a space and your tweet and it would just post it to twitter as usual.

It cuts out the hassle of converting a url to a tinyurl and posting it into your preferred client, and for people who spend a lot of time in their browsers it could be handy.  Right now I have it redirecting to twitterless with a message saying whether or not it was successful, but in the future I plan to include more relavent information such as a list of similar posts.  So far it hasn't replaced Twitteriffic for me but I am trying to see if it's a viable solution or not.

The point is, now that I have the foundation of this app built, I can experiment to my hearts content and I'll have a user-base ready to test it when I do.

You can sign up for twitterless here

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