Onewaysweet: a way to track conversations
Onewaystweet is a simple Twitter mashup that helps you track what people are saying about your site, and when. It hashes the URL (using several different URL compression services, or at any rate, the ones that offer idempotent hashes of the given URL) and performs multiple followup Twitter searches so you don’t have to.
Robert Scoble thinks Twitter isn’t for conversations. That may be true, but that don’t mean that people ain’t sayin’ stuff. Pop in a URL, subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow the results. They may surprise you. Then again, they may not, which may also be surprising. Is disappointment a kind of surprise?
Actually, the queries that result in the greatest amount of buzz have certainly surprised me. Obie Fernandez’s minor mea culpa on the Rails Maturity Model generated a lot of controversy and results in (as of the writing of this post) a fair number of hits; the current New York Times headlines story does not. Is Twitter still so tech-centric?
On the technical front, I’m currently deploying it on Heroku, which was almost absurdly simple to do. As advertised: git push and you’re done, though the site doesn’t use a database and I can’t speak to the deployment experience in that regard. The fact that the developer preview is free certainly doesn’t hurt. Their explanation of how it works is sexy but short on gritty details. I’m okay with that, because in my idealized fantasy world deployment is always Somebody’s Else’s Problem. But the bitter Rake hacker in me is convinced that not having SSH access will be a huge pain in the patootie at some point in the future.