Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to displays live feed of latest twitpics.

http://www.pingwire.com

by allang • 17 years ago

102 50 17 years ago

As usual, when your mind races at night, it's tough to sleep. Instead of tossing and turning, I decided to quickly bang out some code using twitter's search API that displays the latest images posted to twitpic.<p>There's probably so many places I could go with this - so, any ideas for enhancements?

kevinherron• 17 years ago

I know it would take away from the "liveness" of it but it would be neat if you could wait for an entire rows worth of images to appear and have a smooth animation that pushed everything down to make room for that new row.

The way each image is added currently is a little "jarring" visually...

Cool though :-)

derefr• 17 years ago

I suggest they fall in groups of four, join together, and disappear :)

migpwr• 17 years ago

It's probably pretty difficult to filter but there were some serious NSFW pics coming across my screen there. Just a heads up for anyone else who's still at their office.

zeeone• 17 years ago

Man, you're crazy ... I can't stop watching. Now I also can't sleep.

marram• 17 years ago

You guys must not be in North America, because it is 4:25 p.m here.

notaddicted• 17 years ago

That is a pretty good reason not to be able to sleep ;).

It would be cool to be able to click on one to mark it as interesting, and then also see the feed of ones that people mark as interesting (over a longer timespan.)

allang2• 17 years ago

I'm in New York, but I posted it this afternoon from work. There are no guys, it's just me and a little bit of code I wrote in 30 minutes, or 40 minutes tops. I had never seen picfog or any other service - this was just something I wrote because I couldn't sleep.

quizbiz• 17 years ago

care to teach others the process from start to finish? A tutorial based on something similar would be oh so helpful.

paul9290• 17 years ago

check out http://picfog.com. The 1st of many of this type of thing.

Periodic• 17 years ago

That's pretty neat.

However, I can't help asking myself if this real adds any real value to the world. Not that it has to. It's like mental candy. Pleasing, but ultimately lacking in substance.

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

Does everything have to "add real value"?

Anyway, this did add value to the guy who wrote it: He had fun doing it.

I've been thinking a lot about how one can differentiate between art and random shit. Once possibile filter I thought of was: 'Did it make the creator or the audience happy?' But even this doesn't work. Tolstoy disagrees with me on his very first point. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

lpgauth• 17 years ago

Looks like twitpic.com is having some problems...

"502 Bad Gateway nginx/0.6.35"

brown9-22• 17 years ago

I'm getting 403 Forbidden's on all requests at this point

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Heh, as I was watching the images go by TwitPic went down. 502 Bad Gateway.

Hope that wasn't your fault ;)

allang2• 17 years ago

I think it was. Twitpic emailed me asking to start caching. I may have killed twitpic.

domodomo• 17 years ago

Nice job.

omnipresent1• 17 years ago

release the code!

rmason• 17 years ago

In one word - addictive ;<)

shivam14• 17 years ago

Would be nice to have a customizable update timer or a way to slow down the stream.

It appears that some users do not fully grasp the fact that twitter (and related apps) is much more "open" than facebook. Some of the pictures seem pretty private.

grinich• 17 years ago

How much have you made off the ads thus far?

cesare3• 17 years ago

Which ads?

iheartmemcache• 17 years ago

I had to view the source to figure out what he was talking about. There are Google Ads; I didn't see them either (are you using Adblock Plus, also?).

fortes• 17 years ago

Neat -- watch out though, can be NSFW depending on what people are posting.

taitems• 17 years ago

Woah I don't know what I expected when I clicked this link, but definitely not upskirts.

slig• 17 years ago

Really nice to see a modern (kind of) foundphotos.net

kngspook3• 17 years ago

What language did you write it in?

kngspook3• 17 years ago

I'm seeing the same pics over and over; any idea what that's from?

a-priori• 17 years ago

Retweets?

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

another suggestion, hash on the image, keep a list of the last 100 images, if an image re-appears drop it.

philfreo• 17 years ago

This would be really useful if you could filter by subject (search term or hash tag). It'd be a great way to see pictures of a live conference or news event as it was unfolding (to go along with http://almost.at/)

newsio• 17 years ago

It is addictive. Simple, but addictive.

stanleydrew• 17 years ago

looks like twitpic has shut out requests from pingwire's ip?

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

I think it has to do with a referer check, if you copy the links without referring to pingwire it still works.

Pingwire really is mostly javascript, the site is a simple container to deliver that javascript to your browser which will then do the rest of the work all by itself.

It also seems the block isn't perfect, if you let it run long enough some pictures will make it through.

brown9-22• 17 years ago

Don't think it's referrer based - copying and pasting the URL into a completely seperate browser instance still results in 403s for me.

Devils-Avacado• 17 years ago

Cool, its like twoyeur.com but slower

jonah• 17 years ago

Nice! Reminds me of one my friend Ian did: http://gimmeshiny.com/

jazzychad• 17 years ago

I can't see the site (getting 403), but I wrote a live TwitPic viewer for TweetGrid several months ago at http://tweetgrid.com/twitpicgrid - you can filter by search term or hashtag or whatever, or you can just watch the full stream come in.

matthewking• 17 years ago

I've just seen Stephen Fry tweet this, and he has 650k~ followers, looks like its gone viral.. not bad for a nights work.

buckwild• 17 years ago

Would you mind posting the source code (or emailing it to me)? I'm interested in seeing how you coded it (not to mention structured it). My background in developing web applications is relatively weak.

But if you'd like to keep it to yourself, I can understand...no pressure.

boatmeme• 17 years ago

Try http://twitcaps.com - More like 3 sleepless nights of work. But, it does support all major Twitter image hosts and allows searches / filters / captures / location aware, etc.

Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to displays live feed of latest twitpics.

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