TweetClouds, Twubble, & a FB/Twitter App

For any twitter folks out there, here are a few links that are pretty cool.

(1) TweetCloud: This creates a cloud of all your twitters - See HERE for mine.

(2) Bob Lee (better known as Crazy Bob) from Google created Twubble, an app that can help you find more folks you may know on Twitter based on your friends. I am pretty sure it maps off of Google's Social Graph, which is pretty neat.

What I'd like to see? An app that utilizes the Open APIs that Facebook and Twitter have so that I can figure out which of my 500 FB friends use Twitter. Anyone interested in building this for Web 2.0 Expo? If so, I'll buy you a beer next week. If you use Social Graph to build it too, that would be pretty neat... is it possible? /LC

Comments

[Joe Lat1]

At first blush, it's easy enough to get a list of one's friends by way of the various APIs of the social networks, and even use only the OpenSocial API with the appropriate adapter(s), e.g., to Facebook.

What's less obvious is how to determine whether or not a friend uses twitter, e.g.,

1. If a friend has the twitter app installed on their FB profile, then they likely use twitter, but I don't think there's an f8 API to find out if your friend has a certain app installed, much less get information from it like their twitter id.

2. Use an f8 API to query as much information as you can from your friend's profile and search it for twitter clues; if you find enough clues, then the next problem is trying to determine their twitter id using the rather limited twitter search.

3. Short of trying to determine whether or not your FB friend uses twitter by using the f8 API, you can just brute force search twitter, friend by friend. I don't think there's a twitter API for name search, but you can also just scrape the results from http://twitter.com/tw/search/users?q=joe+latone.

There are probably more clever approaches, but as simple an exercise as this should be, I guess it points out the value in some of these centralized/aggregation services now, like FriendFeed, i.e., making up for the short-comings given the lack of a more distributed/open approach to integrating/crossing these networks. This is understandable, though. After all, FB's new chat and mini-feed features are likely taking aim at FriendFeed and twitter, as well they should be since I'm finding myself spending less time on Facebook and more on FriendFeed and twitter. (:

[Michael S. Scherotter]

Joe,
Using the name as the lookup key, I was able to get some successful results and show the matches in a Popfly mashup using Silverlight:
http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2008/04/17/my-facebook-friends-who-are-also-on-twitter.aspx
Michael

[Joe Latone]

Nice, Michael! I was going to try pipes, but this is a good reminder to try my popfly account instead. Oh, and look, facebook & twitter building blocks from MS! Thanks, I'll follow up in with commens on your blog. Joe