Wow, there’s a new trend going on in the Next Web office: making Twitter mash-ups. Last week, co-editor Boris launched Twittercounter – Feedburner for Twitter – and a few hours ago, developer Reinier Ladan (@reinier) sent me a line about his mash-up Twannabe.
Reinier thinks that a good way to find new interesting people is checking out who your hero is following. I can see why, as the guys your hero is following might be the crowd you want to be associated with. Though I’m not sure though whether Twitter followers is a good filter. Imagine for example that your web hero is Jason Calacanis. Well, then I have a news flash for you. He has an auto follow script running and currently tracks the tweets of 28,007 people. Although the Twitter API allows Twannabe to work with only 2000 contacts, it’s still a lot of people to follow.
It does work though when you change the definition. Instead of tracking down the friends of an almost unreachable Web 2.0 millionaire, you might want to see who your friends are following. Than, all of a sudden, Twannabe becomes more useful. But to be honest with you, the ‘view all’ option of Twitter does the job as well. Twannabe just creates a fun experience around it.
Thanks for the coverage Ernst-Jan! Minor detail: Twannabe not only shows you the people someone follows, but the people he/she follows that you don’t follow. That’s a whole lot more useful than the follower overview page on twitter ;-)
Changing the defenition is definitely an option. Working on the concept all the time!
thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.