TopTwit has officially been released and the basics have been completed. Inspiration was heavily drawn from twitter.alltop.com, which displays a bunch of the top Twitter users and their last 5 tweets. I and others thought it would be great to have a customized version of this tool so that you could choose what Twitter users you saw.
Right now it’s pretty basic. You can create an account without an invite, add up to 8 people to track, and then watch their twitter feeds. In the near future, I hope to add a few capabilities to the system:
- Cache the requests for some popular users so that the wait time is reduced. Twitter has had some speed issues lately, and that directly affects the API.
- Build a suggested list for each user based on their current follow list on Twitter. Currently you need to type in the names of all the users you want to watch.
- Use the stats from many users to create popular and upcoming lists of Twitter users that people are watching along with the last 5 tweets from each.
None of this will happen that quickly if I don’t get people to sign up, so if you like it, please spread the word. In the meantime, while I wait for it to be discovered, I’ll pound away at optimizing it so that it works better for all.
