Tweelove – Anonymous twitter greetings
Posted in Blog, Design, Geeky, News, Recent Projects by John
Today sees the launch of a little project we’ve been working on called ‘Tweelove‘. Tweelove is an anonymous twitter messaging service with the aim of spreading a bit of positivity around twitter.
For 383 the site has mainly been an exercise in getting an idea (provided by @Bostinbloke) designed and built quickly. Seeing as it’s coming up to Valentines we figured it could be a bit of fun to design and build this and it also gave us an excuse to be a bit more indulgent than we might otherwise be with our daytime work.
The design came together pretty quickly, and after hammering out a few different ways of creating the interface we settled on a simple ‘pick a word’ and ‘add a message’ format. As well as ensuring the messages have some level of consistency in their tone, ‘picking’ a word at the beginning helps remind people the service is meant to be positive. You can follow the account to see who’s recieving the kudos by following @tweelove, or visit the site yourself to send a few messages.
The development side of the project has itself been a bit of fun, so for those that are interested, you can read about the process here:
The geeky bit
Once the design was handed over, we coded it up and then made a start on the functional parts of the site.
First, to minimise spam from bots and user error we made sure that when someone builds a Tweet the site will check whether the Twitter user who the message is directed @ exists. If they do, the TweeLove account will auto-follow the recipient. If they don’t, then the user will be prompted with an error message to try again. If the service gets used a lot we’ll knock the auto-follow on the head if it’s getting near 400 a day to ensure twitter don’t think there’s any spamming going on!
To minimise abuse the site will also check the body copy of the message for any un-niceities in the text. This checking has been built into a buffer so Tweets don’t just get sent straight to Twitter as the user submits them. The buffer currently submits every two minutes so messages you send will have a slight delay before getting pulled in to the main feed.
Lastly, we used the twitter search RSS feed to catch any messages people might hashtag with #tweelove or @tweelove. This way, people can tweet messages from their own accounts if anonymity isn’t a concern.
