Projecting "tweets" live.
February 18, 2010 4:27 PM

Looking for a "screensaver" application that updates regularly with "tweets" from select hashtags, users, etc. General suggestions welcome, but ideally looking for a service that allows for tweets to be moderated.

The intent is to be able to project the tweets at a live event, allowing for some communication between attendees, but there's a definite need to screen out inappropriate tweets.
posted by Unsomnambulist to Technology (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
According to TWiT this week, Twitter is very protective of their API.
posted by proj at 4:41 PM on February 18, 2010


Doesn't help with the moderation part of your request, but it may be a start:

You can get an rss feed of searches on Twitter (Example). You can get rss screensavers (there's one built into OS X).

The trick will be finding an rss screensaver/broadcaster that allows you filter.
posted by mhz at 5:33 PM on February 18, 2010


You'll probably need to do at least some custom work to get this to where you need to be. The RSS screensaver is a good start; I'm sure there are others out there as well, so do some searching.

Write a script that uses the Twitter API to pull in tweets from your selected hashtags and build out XML feed(s) that can either be manually monitored and moderated, or configured to remove entries that contain blacklisted words you've manually defined. Then feed those feeds into the RSS screensaver, or roll your own using something like Flash.

I'm not sure about Twitter being very protective of their API, so as long as you stay within their rate limit.
posted by nitsuj at 6:16 AM on February 19, 2010


A low-tech way might be to try hooking up the feed with Apple's OSX screensaver "RSS Visualizer".

Otherwise, I would suggest Flash too, if you have any programming interest...
posted by beyond_pink at 6:22 AM on February 19, 2010


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