My personal project Twittfilter is now in Alpha

 

Twittfilter is actually an old project.  I started it last Spring but only shared it with a few friends.  The first feature of Twittfilter is the ability to send you an email if a term (typically your twitter name)  is found in the public stream. Since you get an email  you do not have to be at a desktop to get replies. Pretty useful.

Lately, the number of people whom I follow and follow me have been increasing, and I’ve found I use DM’s on twitter more and more, almost as a secondary email/IM service.  Well this is all good and fine, except when I want to DM or @ someone and do not remember their twitter name.  Clearly we need an address book… and so I wrote one.  While I was at it, I added a few more features.

The making of twittfilter – twitter search bot

Here is the link to the app.  www.twittfilter.com

So, given that I work in technology, and web2.0 for that matter, whatever that means, one would think all of my blogs would be about software. And yet, this is my first. 

Now many of you know I have been playing around with building a twitter service to deal with twitter overload. The easy fix is not following too many people. But then, what happens when someone I do not follow tweets me? Well, if you have unlimited SMS, you can use ‘track’ and have twitter send an alert to your cell phone. That is not an option for me, so on to PHP!

The first thing I did was write a few functions that would go into my timeline and look for @perivision and then send me an email if it shows up. All good. Then a friend said he wanted something like that, so I extended it so that it can look for any word in anyones timeline and send an email. Then I get a request to extend it further to search the public timeline and not only send an email on a match, but retweet it again.

And so its done.

This took more time then I expected, and there were a few functions I wrote that I did not end up using. For example, I thought, ‘hey, I’ll use track, have it send an email, then I’ll read the email with PHP and retweet!’ Yea, great idea! Except track does not send email! And I figure that out AFTER I write the email POP3 reader! Grrrr.. However, to the resue comes various twitter search engines. Ah… much better. So now I do a search every 15min and parse the returns. Once I get a return, I log it into the database, and we’re golden.

Now, time to look into wordpress…