How long is yours and how happy are you with it (twitter style)?
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pmOne of the “useful” services of the web made the rounds on Twitter today: Twicksize allows you to show the world the size of your twick in gradient and round goodness (incidently, mine is 11 inch).
Whilst being stunned by the usefulness of the service and the aesthetic perfection I felt a little prick of annoyance that there was no API for it. Surely showing off your twicksize to the world on your blog would be useful. Well, this can be fixed.
Using the net tab of Firebug, it is pretty easy to detect the API driving the site and you find out that http://twicksize.com/ajax.measureme.php?twittername={user_name} gets you the HTML to show your twember in all its glory.
Using YQL and the correct XPATH you can easily turn this into a data set to work with.
The size is one thing, but as a lot of well-intentioned email keeps telling me it is all about how happy you are with your size. Luckily there is another service called Happy Tweets that uses science, magic and an obviously stunningly clever algorithm to determine the happiness of a twitter user. Again using Firebug we can easily determine that http://happytweets.com/TweetAnalysis.aspx?u={user_name} is the magic URL to get the data and using YQL gives us this information
Putting both together, it is easy to write a simple script to tell the world all about the size of your twick and how happy you are with it:
I am codepo8
I’ve whipped it out for you here. If you want to know about your size and happiness, just use your username as the hash at http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/are-you-twick-happy.html#techcrunch, for example techcrunch or icaaq.
The options are endless, we could for example use Google charts to create a nice image :)
Tags: hack, happytweets, javascript, twick, twicksize, twitter, yql