Idea: Data Twitter

I want a Twitter-style service for freeform, taggable, time-stamped data. My intended purpose would be to log real-world items. Like I’d IM/text/email the Data Twitter service with:

bike ride tags: bike, ride, exercise

writing a blog post tags: status, writing

phone call from annoying dude tags: annoying dude, phone

basketball tags: basketball, sports, exercise

These would all be time-stamped as I add them. A duration may also be useful.

The data could then be queried, searched, accessed via API from other web sites & apps, read via RSS and imported into spreadsheets.

Potential applications:

import specific tags (like ‘exercise’) for a certain time period into a spreadsheet for analysis
power cross-site social widgets from the data feed (most recently listened to songs, task completion, current status)
use as a remote control for triggering events in software monitoring the feeds (bittorrent clients, server administration)

It’s super nerdy, by nature deals with private instead of social data and likely wouldn’t scale, but I still want it.

Posted to idea, nerdy by Brad on 5/13/08 @ 12:41 pm |

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5 Responses to “Idea: Data Twitter”

1
Justin Bacon
May 14th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Tumblr is probably closer to what you’re looking for than Twitter. As far as I can tell, you can’t set tags when you post via e-mail (and the tagging implementation is pretty worthless in general), but maybe you could hack something decent together with the API.

Probably better off writing your own though.
2
nec
May 14th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
can’t you still have it already with twitter? create an account, and post your updates with your own markup, like: bike ride #bike,ride,exercise

then just fetch the updates, parse the text to get tags(#) and split.
3
Gary
May 15th, 2008 at 9:18 am
You may be able to jenk Jott into doing something like that. We’re just getting into using Jott at my company, so I don’t know if it’ll do exactly what you’re looking for.
4
Nick
May 28th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
That sounds pretty sweet. If you decide to write something and want to work with others, let me know… I might be interested.
5
whall
June 16th, 2008 at 2:08 am
That is a good idea. I’m thinking it either needs to be an add-on to Twitter w/markup (TTML?) or maybe jott/utterz. Utterz already has the “email your add-ons with the u.command structure” feature so it seems a sensible add-on.

When speech-to-text gets to be ubiquitous, then you could just specify sounds/words/tags for the API to look for and it would auto-tag.

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Idea: Data Twitter

5 Responses to “Idea: Data Twitter”

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