screeley.com

Is there a 3rd party twitter app that builds a link page based on my follows? If not, someone should build it. It would be my start page.

Fred Wilson posted this tweet a few days ago, a pretty simple requirement. Get all users that Fred is following, parse, get the links and display them for Fred's viewing pleasure. Personally I really like this idea. The problem with an asymmetrical relationship is that you really only follow that person for the interesting links they post. I follow mostly tech people and honestly, their personal comments don't really do much for me. It would be great if I could get all those links into one feed and filter out all the noise.

So in the last 4 days I put together an application to do this. Personal web developer to Fred Wilson and hopefully a few others out there.

First off a few requirements that I added * I'd rather not make the user authenticate, but it turns out that's not such a good idea. Say you are Fred Wilson and you follow 370 people. This means I have to make 370 calls to the twitter apis to get all your friends feeds, a problem when I'm rate limited to 100 an hour. This means you need to authenticate so I can use the friends timeline method. I don't want your password and you don't want to give it to me. Hence we used OAuth. * Get the real link and title of the page, not just the shortened url. * Group by urls to get rid of RTs. * Atom Feeds. I hate leaving Google Reader if I don't have to.

The main issue I have with sites like this is privacy. http://tweetlnks.com/ does sort of the same thing, but look at them. I don't want to give my password to you, ever. This is the reason why I went with OAuth. The other thing is that if your friend's tweets are protected I don't save them. They may be the most interesting person in the world, but if I can't display them in an open feed, they are no good to anyone.

Try it out at http://www.cubbyscott.com/. After you login take note of your Atom feed, because after you authenticate you may never have to come back to the site again. Twitter says that your access token is good forever, so once every 5 minutes or so we grab it and parse your feed again. I'm really hoping that no one that has 300,000 friends logs in because I'll need a fail whale. Please note that Cubby Scott is definitely very Alpha and if it breaks I blame you.

The last interesting part of this app is that a Cubby Scott user's link feed isn't protected in anyway. I'd be interested in looking at a link feed from @biz, @fredwilson or @parislemon and see what they are reading. Privacy issue? You tell me.

The site is built using Django and it's being served off a Linode instance. I'd like to Open Source the OAuth code at some point, but for now it's just a mess. There is a fair amount of caching that is happening in the backend as well. Not ideal for a real time system, but it's being powered by gerbils at this point.

Feedback is welcome. I'm not a designer so, "Your site looks like crap" won't help me much.

And if your interested Cubby Scott is named after a road in Peterborough NH