This weekend a well-known comedian was live-tweeting sardonic commentary for a new Lifetime movie. It got me thinking that it would be cool to be able to replay his tweets later so that someone who missed the live show would be able to sync them up with the movie.<p>That, along with the fact that I've had lots of fun on Twitter during big events (like the elections), made me think that it'd be a fun hack to put together a Twitter playback site.<p>So last night and tonight I threw together http://www.twitterplayback.com.
Check it out an let me know what you think!
Clickable: <a href="http://www.twitterplayback.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitterplayback.com</a><p>Replay of movie commentary: <a href="http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=from%3Aaimeemann+OR+from%3Apattonoswalt+OR+from%3Acampsucks+OR+from%3AMPenn+%23lizanddick" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=from%3Aaimeemann+OR+from%3...</a><p>Tonight's TV: <a href="http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=dancing%20stars" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=dancing%20stars</a><p>Social media contest: <a href="http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23GOU100" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23GOU100</a><p>Sports: <a href="http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23iubb" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23iubb</a><p>The page is (hastily) written using JavaScript, so feel free to take a peek. There's a lot more that can be added to this -- most notably, date ranges, but I think it's pretty fun right now. Oh, and the maximum number of results Twitter will let me have per query is 1500, so keep that in mind.
Awesome concept and execution!<p>Thoughts/suggestions:<p>• I expected there to be a rollback option, perhaps via the '-' button. (Didn't expect to have sticky varying faster-than-realtime rates instead.)<p>• A slider/timeline-scrubber would probably be ideal, with indicator ticks everywhere there's an upcoming tweet. Then you can either 'play' real-time, and drag-'seek' to any interesting point forward or back, and fairly easily re-sync to an approximate minute after out-of-band DVR ops. (Also, 'next'/'prev' buttons would be more natural accelerated navigation to me, rather than the steppable-FF-rate.)<p>• Would benefit from explicit 'permalink'/sharing-of-well-crafted-range-query support. Such permalinks could be decorated with more contextual metadata (eg: name of program).<p>• Does Hulu work in a frame? (Or more generally: permalink metadata mentioned above could include recommended links to legitimate playback sources.)<p>• You might let people layer in their own lagged tweets by assisting them in using a hashtag offset convention. For example, "#lizanddick #11-25t0h8m blah blah blah".<p>There were a few startups attempting to enable synchronous group TV-event watching in past years... but I suspect they all suffered from the rise of DVRs among exactly their online-immersed target audience. Leveraging Twitter and allowing a blend of synchrony or asynchrony might work better.<p>Good luck!
I like the idea very much. In fact this could be extremely useful if you tweak it a little bit.<p>How about instead of waiting and controlling the time speed etc. the app itself keeps playing the tweets along with its duration from the last tweet: "after 2 hours", "after 4 days", "after few mins" etc.<p>That ways I am never waiting for something to appear instead am constantly engaged.
I'm a bit concerned about the name of your project...<p>Here is an excerpt from Twitter's branding guidelines:<p><pre><code> Don't:
* Use Twitter in the name of your website, application or product.
* Register a domain containing twitter, misspellings, transliterations or similar variations thereof.</code></pre>
You should checkout the jQuery timeline plugin. I could see that being a very effective with the horizontal scrollbar to control playback at a macro level.<p>Cool project. The sample you have makes it easy to see the uses. It would be cool if people could submit "fun" or good examples of great timelines. I think that would bring the social aspect into the project. Most people won't have the time to put together the criteria to produce the "query" so having a set of samples would be helpful in gaining traction
I know I'll probably get down-voted - but I have to ask: when will people stop building apps/stuff around twitter and facebook...? It's useless (yes, I know - my opinion).<p>I can understand that it was fun for you to build, no offence - but I don't see the value in things that piggyback on those two services. There are so many real challenges out there...<p>There, I had to say it (not impressed).