This project will probably take me more than a weekend but Twitter's new mute feature got me thinking - I don't need to mute people I follow but I would like to eliminate a lot of their fluff. I can recall at least 10 people I had to unfollow because even though I thought they sent out good stuff, for every good tweet there were 5 worthless ones.
The idea is this: I'd like only a user's best x tweets every day to show up in my feed. Let's define quality by quantifying what happens with a tweet (replies, retweets, favorites, etc). Lots of hand waving here obviously and this part isn't fully baked. Let's ignore this problem for now :-)
So every day an app combs through a user's tweets and picks out the best few tweets. How do I get those tweets into my feed? I'm sure as heck not going to build a new client, though that might be the smoothest implementation. I created a "shadow account" which I can send tweets from and if I follow it, content will show up in my timeline without having to build a separate client.
Everything I've described is fairly easy. Adding new users for the app to monitor, adjusting when the app evaluates tweets, how many to select, etc all require a web or mobile app. I'm not too keen on building that part. I'm hoping I'll know if this is a good idea before I get to this point - the app can be hard coded for now.
I'm hosting this on Openshift and writing it in Python. I've loaded a cron cartridge and envision adding a script to the daily bin. Twitter's API is pretty serious, especially auth, so I'm taking time to learn that. I found a nice little Python library that abstracts the application-only auth mechanism so I'll roll with that for now (Edit: switched to tweepy). My repo is public so feel free to take a look!
