10 Twitter Hack Start-Up Ideas

By Steve Poland   •   March 23, 2007

10 Twitter application ideas — with or without their API are below.

Be sure to throw some Google AdSense around any of these ideas to get a little monetization out of your project.

  1. digg interface — allow people to vote up their favorite twitters (which sometimes are favorite quotes or breaking news items).
  2. Mash ebay’s API (and ebay username) with twitter username — post new items a twitterer is selling as a twitter by that user.
  3. Techmeme of twitterers — tinyurl.com must be seeing tons of traffic increase, because every twitterer is using tinyurl.com URLs. Techmeme keeps track of what the tech blogosphere is blogging about — do the same for Twitter. Grab all the tinyurl.com URLs, convert them to their actual URLs, and see what websites everyone is truly twittering about.
  4. Timeline for each city — start storing the public timeline xml feed and allowing a user to input a specific city to see what’s been said lately by people that live there.
  5. RSS feeds of keyword specific queries — A Twitter search engine already exists (you could do the same by pulling all twitters from public timeline xml feed), but it should also be an RSS feed, so you can see who’s talking about something you care about (music bands, product, movie, sports team, city, etc).
  6. Twitter Tag Cloud — similar to above; start indexing the public timeline xml feed and see what everyone is talking about — overall, past 24 hours, past 1 hour, etc. User could input a Twitter username and see a specific user; or specific user and their friends; or just the friends of a specific username.
  7. Twitter users specify a blog / MySpace URL — start indexing those and tying people together based on their friends and followers. Input a username and you’ll see “spheres of influence” — or 6 degrees of separation. Maybe display where these people all exist on a map.
  8. My followers live where? I’d love to see a Google Map of all my followers — so if I’m going to San Fran for the weekend, I could hit someone up and say hi! (note: I’ll likely know where my friends are, but this day in age that might not be the case — so display them too).
  9. Categorization: Mash twitters up with some sort of directory of categories with content from those categories, and start an auto-categorization of twitters. Thus, if someone twitters about ’springsteen’ or ‘ratm’ or ‘bloc party’, then those are music-related.
  10. MyBlogLog copycat — a widget that people put in their webpage, which displays recent twitter visitors to their page. Also allows those people to quickly post a twitter about the webpage they just visited. List all twitter comments for that URL in the widget as well.

I’m on Twitter.




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Comments

16 Responses to “10 Twitter Hack Start-Up Ideas”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 Steve Poland on March 23rd, 2007 9:30 pm (perm link)

    Cool new idea — http://twitthis.com/

  2. MyAvatars 0.2 Colin Dowling on March 23rd, 2007 11:45 pm (perm link)

    I have not begin using twitter. Frankly, the whole app seems like an hybrid of vanity and boredom that I’m not sure I have interest in. It amazes me that a product that makes it easy to share relatively unimportant info snippets is growing so quickly.

    That said, I think the real value in this app lies peer journalism. A twitter news product would be hot. Like most techies, I love being in the know immediately when something happens. Combining topical news alerts with the power of individuals reporting tha news would be awesome.

  3. MyAvatars 0.2 Chris on March 24th, 2007 12:12 am (perm link)

    I’m not sure if Twitter already does this or if you mentioned it somewhere, but it seems that the Twitter Widget on your site only shows things that you have added to Twitter… How about showing all the Twitter posts of you and your friends, then anyone could scroll through and see where the party’s at.

  4. MyAvatars 0.2 Phil801 - Geek Blog » Utah Geek Dinner, Twitter and Jott on March 24th, 2007 1:19 am (perm link)

    [...] of what you’re doing (which I enjoy btw). I’ve seen a couple blog posts with ideas here and here and Janet started a discussion about it today. I can’t remember if I read this idea [...]

  5. MyAvatars 0.2 links for 2007-03-24 | mad dog in the fog on March 24th, 2007 8:41 am (perm link)

    [...] Techquila Shots ยป 10 Twitter Hack Start-Up Ideas OK, now someone needs to build these cool Twitter hacks. (tags: twitter) [...]

  6. MyAvatars 0.2 Sachman on March 24th, 2007 10:51 am (perm link)

    Check out my killer app idea for twitter

    http://republicofinternets.com/2007/03/24/twitter-the-micro-managers-killer-app/

  7. MyAvatars 0.2 Kevin on March 25th, 2007 12:27 am (perm link)

    Great post, it’s interesting to think of Twitter as a data stream that can be mined for useful data and exposed as a web service. I was going to flesh out an idea around a heat map site where you could enter a keyword and it would light up the cities/regions where that world was being mentioned most in the past 24 hours. i.e. you could enter “Arcade Fire” and see a flurry of activity around Oslo, Norway - the city where they are playing tonight (or would be if Winn’s voice wasn’t shot). You could also view Twitters and potentially meet up with others who are going to the concert or need tickets. It’s basically a combination of #5 mentioned about, TwitterVision, and the “Vyous” idea you posted about previously.

  8. MyAvatars 0.2 Wordpress Guy on March 25th, 2007 11:01 am (perm link)

    I love idea 10 and would be surprised if they don’t launch something like this soon - the tech can’t be too far from what they already run.
    Another idea I can see happening is an extension of #5 where searches for tweets similar to “anyone know how to do X in Excel” are used by a telephone IT support service who then message the tweeter something like “call xxx xxxxx for immediate help, just $2″. The challenge would be following the blog link in the tweeter profile to find contact details.
    Of course as soon as that happens everyone gets tired of twitterspam and starts either blocking it or leaving the service.

  9. MyAvatars 0.2 Jeremy on March 26th, 2007 2:09 pm (perm link)

    These are great ideas. We saw the “twitter vision” last week, told at least 10 people about it, and I spent nearly an hour on the mashup (so far).

    Twitter is definitely the “hot” start up right now with all the buzz they have going.

  10. MyAvatars 0.2 Soulsailor on March 27th, 2007 11:01 am (perm link)

    I would love some integration between iTunes/Last.FM etc and Twitter…

  11. MyAvatars 0.2 Dan W on April 2nd, 2007 11:44 am (perm link)

    I liked your idea for a twitter techmeme so I quickly made a simple one! Check it out at http://twithot.com/

  12. MyAvatars 0.2 Steve Poland on April 2nd, 2007 9:44 pm (perm link)

    @Dan — Thanks for the link back. Nice site. I’d start determining the # of users that are actually referencing a particular link or domain. Because ’stationripper.com’ I think is just posting links from one username, but skewing the entire result set.

  13. MyAvatars 0.2 StationRipper on April 11th, 2007 9:26 pm (perm link)

    StationRipper is actually a app the records music - users of that app can twitter what they are recording, as they record it. The twitter has the web site URL as part of it.

  14. MyAvatars 0.2 Manohar Vanga on September 24th, 2008 5:00 pm (perm link)

    I’ve been following your site for a few months now and some of the ideas are really cool!

    This is not really related to the topic, but I think virtual worlds are growing in popularity lately. An idea could be to build a more “interactive” environment to receive twitters. Even something like a Twitter messenger might do the trick.

    Regards
    Manohar Vanga
    I Blog Here : http://www.manoharvanga.com

  15. MyAvatars 0.2 separati.st » Daily Interesting Shizzle for January 30th on January 30th, 2009 8:31 am (perm link)

    [...] » 10 Twitter Hack Start-Up Ideas - By Steve Poland - web startup ideas and brainstorms, straig… [...]

  16. MyAvatars 0.2 Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on March 25th, 2009 6:10 pm (perm link)

    I built number 10. Add it to your sidebar! Get it at http://twittercounter.com…;.

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