A Project Begins With A Clearly Defined Idea

The theme of Brian Wong’s site (http://followformation.com/) is as follows:

“followformation is a tool that helps you follow the top people on twitter by city and by interest.”

How do you define city and interest?  Imagine you have a developer you hired. You can tell him to make it as the description says above.  But chances are he/she will deviate from what you wanted him to do.

You can define city as as the city that the twitter members selected in the twitter profile.  But how do you obtain this information?  You can see if twitter let’s you access this information by seeing what the twitter API allows you to do.

API (Application Programming Interface) sounds like a term more for programmers, but as a business owner, you need to know what it is.  API is basically what a site allows you to access.  In this scenario, you will need to check Twitter API and see if it’s possible to get the person’s city information.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/w/search?q=user%20profile

I searched the term “user profile” in the twitter API, the results are returned by the link above. Here are some of the results:

• Twitter REST API Method: GET list members Method: GET /:user/:list_id/members Returns the members of the specified list. URL: http://api.twitter.com/1/user/list_id/members.format Formats: xml, json HTTP Method(s): GET Requires … Marcel Molina edited 1 year, 4 months ago
• Twitter REST API Method: GET list subscribers Method: GET /:user/:list_id/subscribers Returns the subscribers of the specified list. URL: http://api.twitter.com/1/user/list_id/subscribers.format Formats: xml, json HTTP Method(s): GET &nbs… Marcel Molina edited 1 year, 4 months ago
• Twitter REST API Method: GET list statuses Twitter REST API Method: GET /:user/lists/:list_id/statuses Show tweet timeline for members of the specified list. URL: http://api.twitter.com/1/user/lists/list_id/statuses.format Formats: xml, json, … Marcel Molina edited 1 year, 3 months ago
• Twitter REST API Method: statuses friends tatuses/friends Returns a user's friends, each with current status inline. They are ordered by the order in which the user followed them, most recently followed first, 100 at a time. (Please note that the result set isn'… Taylor Singletary edited 1 year ago
• Twitter REST API Method: statuses followers

From the above, I know that I can get list members, subscribers, status, friends, followers of any user’s twitter account using the Twitter API.  As a business owner, that’s, really, all you need to know - knowing what is possible.  If you want to know if you can access city information by Twitter, you can now search for “location”.

How do you define “interest”?  You will need to propose a way to do so.  But a simple search for “category” in the Twitter API will show you the following:

Twitter REST API Method: GET users suggestions category

Access the users in a given category of the Twitter suggested user list.

You can now further re-organize the categories as “interests”.  Of course you will need to define these as precise as possible.  Since the end goal of this project is to build a document that anyone can implement the project.

How do you decide what users you want to show for each category (top people)?  You can filter them by city and interest and then rank them in terms of the number of followers, the number of lists.

So far, we have come up with a very clear idea that the developer, or anyone will understand.