twiner, n.  That which twists together or interweaves.

BACKGROUND

Twitter facilitates amazing multi-user conversations, but they can be
very difficult to follow unless you happen to be playing along in
real-time.  Things like threaded replies help somewhat, but the flow 
of the conversation isn't back & forth between pairs of people -- it's
more like a roundtable with several people all speaking to each other.  

Given all of this, I find the easiest way to make sense of things
is just to view all tweets of all participants, in time order,
over the time they took part in the conversation.  Thus: twiner, a tool 
that takes people's twitter streams and twists them together.

USAGE

This is a pretty quick-and-dirty tool, so a little legwork is required
to use it.  Open up config.json; specify the users whose tweets you
want to include, and from which tweet to which tweet.  Run the script;
it will give you a very bare-bones HTML file on standard output,
and terse status messages on standard error.

The included config file functions as an example -- it captures a 
few better-known folks in the Agile and Software Testing communities 
having a conversation about the evolution of software development.
Output is in example-output.html. 



CAVEATS & KNOWN ISSUES

This is pre-alpha code.  None of the requisite things that you
need to have a reliable piece of software have been done.

There's no error handling.  If you run into an error condition
you'll just have to run the whole script again.

There's no user interface to speak of.  The method of specifying what
to fetch in a JSON file isn't particularly friendly.  The script also
doesn't pick up retweets and doesn't have an option to do so.

There's no sanity checking; it doesn't even check to see if the 
start_tweet and end_tweet IDs are in the right order.  If you feed it
strange data, strange things will happen.

There's no filtering or escaping.  For the love of ghod don't use 
this code for anything remotely security-sensitive.

Finally, there's no rate throttling.  If you give it a huge number of
tweets to fetch, it will hammer twitter just as fast as it possibly
can, which might make the nice folks at twitter very upset with you. 

I'm happy to address all of these if people find this code useful. 


NOTES

I scraped the rudiments of this together in a few hours despite never
having worked with the Twitter API before.  I think this says a great
deal about the utility of REST APIs in general, the utility of the 
Twitter API in particular, and the overarching awesomeness of CPAN.


LICENSE

Released under the same license as Perl: namely, either the Artistic
License, or the GPL, at your option.


AUTHOR

Rick Scott <rick@shadowspar.dyndns.org>