Wishful Coding

Didn't you ever wish your
computer understood you?

Free premium Twitter marketing tool

A friend told me about someone who sells a Twitter product for marketeers for around €300. What this tool does is that it keeps track of hash tags you specify and mails tweets to you, so you can answer questions and get new followers.

I was surprised to say the least. I frequently write these kind of things, but I find them to trivial to sell, I told my friend. To prove my point, I wrote this Python script - which I will give away for free - that tracks keywords, makes a noise and opens tweets in a browser as it finds them.

import json
import webbrowser
import urllib2
import urllib

#http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_methods#track
kwds = "#durftevragen photoshop"
# Twitter username
uname = ""
#Twitter password
pwd = ""

password_mgr = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()

top_level_url = "http://stream.twitter.com"
password_mgr.add_password(None, top_level_url, uname, pwd)

handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_mgr)

opener = urllib2.build_opener(handler)

data = opener.open('http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json?track=' + urllib.quote_plus(kwds))

for line in data:
    j = json.loads(line)
    url = 'http://twitter.com/' + j['user']['screen_name'] + "/status/" + j['id_str']
    print url
    print('\a')
    webbrowser.open(url)

Now that I have given you worth €300 of Python code for free, I'd like to ask you a favor. I recently started my own company that is specialized in Wordpress blogs, Twitter tools and other web services and I'd like to know about the Twitter tool you've always wanted and what you'd pay for it.

Some ideas of myself(and my friend):
  • Extend my Twitter email suit with this tracking.
  • Multiple keywords
  • Organized in nice IMAP folders.
  • Reply per email(No need to visit Twitter).
  • Assemble a FAQ/knowledge base on your Wordpress blog.
  • Tweet random facts from there.