For whatever reason during my life online, I've had the good fortune to be something of an early adopter. I also like to build stuff online. These traits came in pretty handy over the past year or so as Twitter came on the scene.
I had occasion to have no fewer than 10 conversations with a wide range of people about what I've done with Twitter and what its potential is to reach others. I thought, after the fifth conversation, that perhaps I should get some of this down in a post. So here goes. Without further ado, are 10 ways I've used Twitter, and without even directly touching the Twitter API.
Pub Crawls
In October 2007, I learned about Twitter, and I didn't really know what to do with it, like many people who are arriving to the scene right now. I did, however, talk a bunch of trash about how I was going to build a "kickass" web site for a pub crawl that my brother-in-law and some friends had been running for more than a decade.
Thus, my first twitter account @qpc. I added my cell phone number to the device, and pre-entered each tweet as a saved draft. When we moved from bar to bar, I only had to hit send. This came in handy later on in the day, as the potential for typos rose with each subsequent bar ;-)
inaug09.com and dctrip09.com
A couple weeks before the inauguration, I heard that NPR had established the hash tags #inaug09 for people to tweet on inauguraiton day and #dctrip09 for people making the trip to DC. I also noticed the .com addresses for these tags were still available. So I bought 'em. Then I had to figure out what to do with them.
What I ended up doing was a pretty lame hack, but it was very educational.
First, I went to search.twitter.com and did a search for inaug09.
I then took the RSS feed http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09 and added it to a new pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Because there were so many tweets coming through at once, I wanted the Pipe to pull in multiple pages of tweets, so I added http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=2 http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=3 and so on.
