Five awful sites built on the Twitter API

by Lee Mathews Nov 19th 2008

Since Twitter decided to take care of the frequent outages that used to plague its servers, I've actually started using it here and there. It's a nice service, and definitely has useful applications. You've only got to look as far as sites like NowPublic and Twubble to see how the API can be put to good use.

However, there are a mountain of applications feeding off it and they're not all contenders for Best in Show. These five definitely are, but only if it's a show dedicated to sucking at Twitter API use.

Twitemperature
Finally, a service that can tell you how hot or cold you are on Twitter. Does anyone actually need this? I suppose there are people that think Twitter is like a web 2.0 popularity contest, but can't you look at your follower total and figure this out yourself?

I'd also like to know how their script works. Their "hottest" tweeter has 55 followers. The crowd has spoken, and 55 < hot. Also, his level of hotness is referred to as "volcanic" and features a picture of a guy holding Tabasco - arguably one of the least-hot hot sauces you can buy.

And no, I'm not just bitter because I'm only a few degrees above freezing.

Cursebird
What a great use for the Twitter API - a realtime display of all the posts that contain swearing! Wow. It's your app, Twitter, but no [expletive deleted] way I'd let something like this chew up any of my server resources.

There's an old saying that goes "You can't polish a turd." Baby, you'll never put a shine on this one.

Twitter Weather
Hey, I know what would make people more interested in my Twitter page: daily weather updates for my home town! I can see my follower count steadily rising once I start auto-posting forecasts for Northern Manitoba. Oh wait, it doesn't support Canada. Or any of the valid US zip codes I tried.

There are a thousand places to get weather info that make more sense than someone's Twitter feed. Weather.com, for example.

TweetWants
The site says "You want stuff. Stuff is cool. You want it so much, you tweet about it" As far as I can tell, this piece of trash just skims anything with the word "want" in it. For example: "Eric Schmidt Really Really Wants that Obama Administration Job."

Err...Does a White House appointment really count as "stuff?"

There's also a TweetFails sister site which sucks an exactly equal amount. The credits for both say "thrown together in, like 5 minutes." I wouldn't have guessed. Really.

You know you've seen them - so what's the worst re-use of Twitter you've come across?

Tags: api, failure, twitter

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 9:56AM on 11-19-2008

With great API's comes great responsibility. I think Twitterank was pretty lame, considering I was dumb enough to input my password (although I promptly changed it, but still).

Khuffie said 11:10AM on 11-19-2008

You forgot twitter.com *rimshot*

Honestly, I haven't heard so much about twitter other than from DS

RazorD said 11:21AM on 11-19-2008

Twitemperature is scarily addictive. I was top of it for a few hours yesterday, and ended up meeting about 50 new people because of it.. It's really not as useless as you think :P

Christopher Finke said 11:56AM on 11-19-2008

Twitemperature has nothing to do with how many followers you have; it's how closely related your tweets are to the current trends.

C.K. said 10:23PM on 11-19-2008

Correct. How it works is detailed (somewhat) here:

http://twitemperature.com/faq/

Thanks for mentioning us first! Happy to be up there with Cursebird. Love that site!

Cheers,

C.K. (co-founder of Twitemperature)

Dark Morford said 12:18PM on 11-19-2008

Actually, you [i]can[/i] polish a turd. Mythbusters got a high-gloss finish on not one, but two varieties of animal feces last week, and the only additive was tap water.

Dark Morford said 12:20PM on 11-19-2008

Bah, I forgot to use HTML tags instead of bbCode. Sorry about that.

Andy said 1:48PM on 11-19-2008

He's probably holding Tabasco because it's a nationally known hot sauce, not because it's the hottest.

Kat2 said 7:34PM on 11-19-2008

Cursebird is actually a ripoff of my friend's site, Shitwitter. Shitwitter started more than 2 months before Cursebird.

Sean Bonner said 2:51PM on 11-20-2008

Hey Lee!

Thanks for plugging the sites! I know that what you do is super difficult and stuff, so I don't blame you for making a few GIANT errors in your post. First off, tweetwants doesn't pull any post that has the word "want" in it, as you suggest. It pulls tweets that have the word "want" immediately followed by a URL. So it wouldn't pull the example you suggested. It's a minor difference but pulls a very different string of results. Tara and I found ourselves searching for those things all the time, and figured a site that did it for us would be cool.

We didn't know what we were doing before going into this, so it was just as much about learning how to work with the APIs as it was to build the sites. Which brings me to my next point - both sites do not say they were thrown together in 5 minutes. Tweetfails does because it was, we took the site that we spent a few weeks hacking on and changed a few things for that. Again, minor point but something you could have easily checked before spouting off about. I know that it's much easier just to say that something is on a site rather than actually looking at it to make sure it is, but isn't that like your job or something?

Anyway, thanks for the post and the links and the traffic and stuff. Any day I can annoy a dude on the internet enough to make a blog post about it is a win in my book. Keep on truckin!

seanbonner said 2:53PM on 11-20-2008

Also, OMG http://bacontwits.com !

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