Syrinx (named after the aspect of avian anatomy which enables birds to sing) is an attempt at Twitter filtering, summarization, and aggregation. It's currently a library and hopefully will also become an app or a mini-app. Its goal is to act as a drama firebreak, a redundancy eliminator, an automatically-generated "best of" album, and an aid to concentration and productivity.
- Download tweets with
tgem - Filter, sort, summarize, and categorize
- Render as HTML
- Run process hourly
- Comprehensive hourly summary vs constant updates
When I first thought of this, I planned to call it Twitter Newspaper. Twitter the company seems very attuned to the usefulness of its data for real-time analysis, but they seem to have a huge blind spot for all other use cases. Historical analysis of the past 24 hours, also known as "the news," was wildly popular throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and doesn't seem to be going away.
Syrinx should end up like a more stable version of Hacker Newspaper, but for Twitter, plus a few summarization and analysis features.
This project's a work in progress. Currently it contains a bunch of useful objects for importing and filtering tweets, as well as a simple Ruby script which uses those objects. The script's heavily inspired by the style Gary Bernhardt uses in the Destroy All Software screencast Functional Core, Imperative Shell, while most of the objects and specs take their inspiration from other material in Destroy All Software, especialy the Sucks/Rocks series.
If you set download_tweets.bash running in a cron job, with the
permissions necessary to create/edit a file called since.csv, you can
then run functional_core_imperative_shell.rb in a cron job as well to
auto-generate a list of links from Twitter. You can see example output
at http://twitter-links.gilesb.com. The list's sorted into categories,
but uses tables and has no CSS. It's a simple toy example; the code has
other capacities and my long-term goals for it are a bit bigger.
- Fixtures in code, almost
- Lots of stylistic and structural problems (which are hopefully hard to spot)