MettaProgramming

When the [rediviva] divas came to me to explore the idea of building a regional, public events calendar, I got all fuzzy inside. Not because I’m really interested in buggy PHP websites like I built for a prototype, no. I got fuzzy because this is something that could help many more people than just us.

The outcome: Calendula

The current prototype was built in a couple days leveraging Google Calendar. This is running basically as a way to generate the data necessary to plan the overall system. The long term idea is much more grand. A “plop-n-play” system that any individual or group can use to organize in their local community. Multiple connected calendars, user authentication, announcements, and cool website plugins.

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make Calendula something that others can use easily in their community, but it’s been pretty popular in the Gorge so far, despite it’s horribly buggy and fragile PHP code.

[rediviva] Magazine is a local arts, culture and events magazine in Hood River, Oregon. I’m the go-to guy for their technical needs, including web development.

It’s not glamour, working on their website, but it is interesting. Any decent web developer would recognize WordPress and the Mimbo theme. That’s not exciting at all. What is exciting is the back-end development we have going on. From Gorge-centric blogging networks to public events calendars, the [rediviva] divas come up with some great, complex ideas that are challenging, but that also help our local community. This is where programming shines– real applications that help real people.

Twitter is not exactly the end-all-be-all of intelligent conversations. While I used it regularly to connect with colleagues and organize projects and events, I still have to admit that the vast majority of traffic is blubber.

That said, there are some interesting aspects of Twitter for those interested in data analysis. Tweetscore is an exploration of some of those aspects. @Tweetscore is a web application that’s not quite ready for prime-time, but which is nonetheless useful and interesting.

Contextual Gaming

There are a number of games on Twitter, like SpyMaster, which involve interaction with a game through Twitter, but the game itself has little to nothing to do with any conversations that are currently going on in Twitter. At best, people have conversations about SpyMaster.

Tweetscore is different. It can be described best as “open, contextual ranking.” With Tweetscore, you give people points by sending a messages such as “@tweetscore give 3 points to @mettadore for telling me about @shizzow closing it’s doors #inpdx”

In this way, the game is one of points giving and points taking, but rather than being orthogonal to the conversation, the points can be, and mostly are, based on the ongoing conversation.

Users are able to use and track tags. Other features are also planned such as tagging a speaker or a talk at a convention and ranking that event based on the tag, allowing any live tweeters to add or remove points. Users can collect badges as well, for giving or taking points, for giving points to new users, etc.

Why Tweetscore?

I’m building Tweetscore not because I particularly care about giving Twitter users a way to rank each other, but because Twitter is one of the best live, freely available data sources in existence. My interest is in contextual scoring as well as tracking and visualizing time series data. Having real data about how people score each other and events, how they use tags, and how data changes over time is invaluable for developing other applications. By building Tweetscore, I get to explore algorithm development in a non mission critical way, things like:

• Building & Deploying a Rails app (I’m still new at it
• Ranking and scoring
• Tag parsing and scoring via tags
• Contextual parsing of text streams
• Badge and user status algorithms
• Live time-series graphing and analysis

In short, Tweetscore, is a way to pre-build other applications– but to have a bit of fun at the same time.

What’s The Status?

Right now, Tweetscore is pretty fragile, the tracking algorithms on the website need some work, as does the text parsing, but development is happening pretty fast. You’re welcome to use it. Just send a message in the format “@tweetscore give X points to @USER…” or “@tweetscore give @USER X for…”. You can also take points away by tweeting with a negative sign like “@tweetscore give -X to @USER” but be warned, you can hit people all you want, but you pay for it.

I’ll post a messages when Tweetscore is full on live, once we knock a few more bugs. Let me know what you think about it.