API Use

What is an API? Wiki says this, Twitter says this. They are both right. In general terms it is a collection of PUBLIC code routines that you can embed in your pages and programs that feed off data and functionality contained in their service.

_some_ applications associated with twitter, for instance, use the userbase of twitter to authenticate, _some_ grab a particular users feed and stream that into their service, and so on.

If you publish services and feeds in known ways, others can use them and "emergent" applications are the result. _some_ examples are presented below:

Trendsmap is a data analysis application that makes sense of topics discused in the twitterverse and applies them to geographical maps - a fascinating global resource that lets you have a "birds-eye" view on what is on the minds of twits across the globe.

Why would you want to do this?
Trends are interesting - topics that people are talking about say much about the situation they 1find themselves in - politically and socially that is valuable information

Brisly is a twitter "wrapper" or client of sorts, not that dissimilar to tweetdeck, "destroy twitter" or tweetie, except that it attempts to pretty up the tweet-stream, and value-add linked services. That these services exist is interesting in itself - a client service to pretty up the original service _might_ mean the original service is poorly designed?

Why would you want to do this?
Twitter is not very pretty, and keeps it's stream compact - requiring users to dig into links to see attached information, Brisly expands some of that out, tries to surround the user feed with value-added, extracted and interpolated data it can garner from your tweets. Good or bad? Dunno...interesting though.

Twapper Keeper is a service that allows you to archive and organise tweets based on hash tags used in them - you define special hash tags (words/coded preceded by the hash symbol #eg) as organisers of collections of tweets - twapper keeper files and stores these tweets OUTSIDE of twitter perpetually.

Why would you want to do this?
The "live" stream of twitter is _very_ busy, watching a topic is actually fairly challenging without the use of a client program. Archiving and organising what people say on particular topics might just be a great idea.

TwitterVision 3D is a mashup that uses Google earth and twitter to geo-locate the origins of tweets - it is cute, but why would we want to do this?

http://woofertime.com/ is a "parody" website that harvests Twitter user accounts and authenticates using the Twitter API, but is touted as a "macroblogging" website, requiring users to enter a minimum of 1400 characters before they can go public. Is there any merit is insisting on QUANTITY of a post, is there any correlation between quantity, frequency of posting and QUALITY?

...got any good twitter applications to share? Share and Enjoy