OUseful Info

iTwitterous - serendipiTwitterous on iPod Touch

[UPDATE: the current version of iTwitterous can be found at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ajc.php;
for more info about the updates, see iTwitterous - Experimenting with hashtags and Twemes and iTwitterous update]

Last week, I got hold of an iPod Touch (thanks Martin), but I didn't really have a play with it - and then only a quick one - till the weekend.

First thing to do was work out how to add a home screen icon for the BBC iPlayer and podcast web pages (Add to Home Screen from the bookmarks menu), how to delete a home screen icon (just press it until it jiggles...) and then, after seeing a few tweets about it, a home screen icon to the hahlo Twitter client.

Realising quite quickly that a lot of embedded media doesn't work as embedded media, I also added the iTransmogrify bookmarklet (iTransmogrify installation guide) which replaces embedded media with links to the media items, that the iPod Touch can then handle appropriately.

And then I had a look at doing a quick web page specifically for the touch. I opted for the iUI style library, which can generate menu like pages built up in a way reminiscent of wml card decks (I'll maybe do a quick transformation of the demo WAP/WML course pages I produced 6 years ago (?!) as iUI pages...).

Being a lazy sort, I thought I'd reuse one of my other tinkered apps and just port it to iUI. Along the way, I made a few changes to the information architecture of the app, to make it easier to extend in the future.

So here it is, the first attempt at serendipiTwitterous (about serendipitwitterous), for the iPod Touch. The screenshots come from iphoneTester, but they work equally well in a browser (and best in Safari - which is now available for Windows, as I'm sure you've all heard... In fact, you may find it's appeared on your Windows desktop already, as if by magic...)

Just because, I've called the app iTwitterous - http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ist.php The current URL is http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ajc.php.

(To use your own id as the starting page, the url should be something like: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ist.php?id=yourTwitterID [that is, http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ajc.php?id=yourTwitterID] )

The first menu option (Tweets) is just a view over you and your friends Twitter feed:

Clicking on a link takes you to the page. Clicking on a Twitter username takes you to the iTwitterous page for that user:

The serendipiTerms menu option takes you to a list of terms extracted from the current user's personal and friends twitter stream using the Yahoo pipes term extraction routine.

Each of these serendipTerms then links to search results based on those terms.

Clicking through a link takes you through to the web page.

Thinking back to Martin's post on Tweetclouds, I guess I could use those as alternative serendipTerms (cloudTerms, I guess) and then rank them according to weight?

Hmm, looking at my own Tweetcloud, it looks a bit simplistic - just listing all the words in the stream after filtering some common ones out... I'm sure there's something in Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications that could do a far better job... ;-)

Tags: itwitterous, serendipitwitterous

Posted by ajh59 at April 7, 2008 11:28 AM