Meet Twitterpate
I let the cat out of the bag on twitter today and sent someone a link to Twitterpate. Twitterpate is my threaded-twitter experiment. I started it a couple of weeks ago in my spare time. If you follow the twitter eco-system at all then you're more then aware of the ever-increasing number of twitter-clients that have hit the scene. Each of these clients offers a unique set of features catered to a specific tweet-need, whether it be for a mobile device, trends, hash tags or what have you. A couple of clients have recently tried tackling the threading issue, but none of them, in my opinion, have done the task justice.
Here's the issue I wanted to solve... If you "tweet" you may be replying to someone else's tweet. When this happens you sometimes lose track of what's happening in a chain of replies. This is because twitter is pretty linear. New tweets appear at the top of a timeline with little connection to previous tweets that they may be replying to. If multiple conversations are occurring simultaneously then things can get messy and you run the risk of losing track of where the conversation is going or what you're replying to. I've run into this issue many times.
Twitter tried to reconcile these problems with the introduction of a reply-to field on a tweet, and then with the addition of a link to a tweet's originating message if available. This is fine, but it winds up being a lot of extra work to follow a conversation and it prevent you from getting a full view of a conversation. This is where Twitterpate comes in. Twitterpate is a web based twitter client designed to parallel your twitter home page, but with the power of threading. It also features some other handy tools, including auto-updating, grouping by day and some preliminary filtering capabilities.
Right now this is a spare-time project, but I hope to expand what I've started and continue to add features to it. I'm also fairly confident there will be bugs to work out a long the way as well. Twitterpate uses OAuth, so if you're curious and want to take a look, but don't want to share your twitter credentials don't sweat it. All authentication happens on twitter, so you don't have to worry about any of your "stuff" ever falling into the wrong hands.
I'm really curious to get feedback and if you find any bugs, please let me know.
As a disclaimer... the name "Twitterpate" is intended to be a play on the the phrase "twitterpated" from the Disney movie, "Bambi". If you don't get it, rent the movie!
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