I find conversations in twitter hard to follow. For a start they’re backwards, the first thing you see is the last item in the conversation. Add to that the fact there very sporadic, it’s difficult to see which tweets users are reacting to, and it doesn’t make for a great conversation experience. I put together TwitMemento with the aim of fixing that. Firstly, it changes the order you see tweets in, instead of new ones being inserted at the top, they're inserted at the bottom, like a normal chat client or message board. Secondly Twit Memento also automatically detects groups of people talking to each other and displays them together, correctly ordering the tweets.
It’s written in F# (as you might have guessed if you follow this blog regularly). It's based on Twitter’s new HTTP streaming API's so tweets come in as they happen, no need to refresh, and uses OAuth so your password is never seen by the app. It’s based on Don Syme’s Twitter streaming example and use’s Luke Hoban’s Twitter OAuth sample. Thanks guys!
I actually didn’t start out meaning to build a twitter app. I was looking at the example’s with a view to doing some data mining, maybe hosted in Azure, when thinking about what to mine it occured to me it might be nice to group people who spoke to each other. Then I thought this information would be more useful in a local client than in some data mining tool!
For those of you who want to know what it looks like, here it is:
The code is on github. It can also be downloaded from github. It requires .NET 4 to be installed to use the client and the code has project files Visual Studio 2010.
It take’s its name from Christopher Nolan's Memento film from 2000.