We’re Gearing up for Chirp

Next week is Chirp, the inaugural Twitter developer conference, and as I mentioned, Rich, Anthony and I are attending.

Safe to say, we’re all pretty excited, although it looks to be a marathon, with the conference running pretty much 9-6 on the 14th, the hack day starting right after and running for 24 hours, and then, the all-important after party.

I know we’re all looking forward to tinkering with the Twitter API and building some apps. Rich (@rmanalan) is nearly done with his first app, which was inspired by Matt (@topperge).

Matt’s initial use case was for conferences:

All I want to do is track a hashtag on twitter (streaming API) and automatically create a list under my account. For example if I go to a conference and want to track the conference tag (i.e. #wire) it’ll automatically create a list with all the people who tweet with the #wire hashtag and can continue / follow the conversation after the conference.

Of course, an app like this would be useful for any search, e.g. #pdxboom. I’m starting to find more value in Twitter lists as a good way to listen to people temporarily or based on a subject, e.g. you might only want to see my tweets related to Oracle.

Rich calls it “a better way to find and follow”, which makes a lot of sense. Its name is Twopper.

I’ve seen the beta version, and it’s slick. Rich still has a few night’s worth of coding to do, but it’s looking really good. Ideally, he’ll make an announcement here when finished.

What better place to put Twopper through its paces than at a conference. A Twitter developer conference.

As an aside, I got the rare opportunity to introduce Rich to something new today. He hadn’t heard of oneforty, the app store for Twitter apps.

Anyway, I have a few ideas of my own to develop. The one at the top of my list is the easiest to build so I’ll probably work on it.

I want an app whose only function is to tweet. No loading tweets. No lists. No profiles. All it does is tweet.

Being an OG iPhone user, I’m nearly always on Edge when I’m out and about, and when I want to tweet something, I don’t have the bandwidth to wait for apps to load my timeline.

This was peaked my interest in Twitterfone way back in the day, but it never caught on for me, partially because the voice recognition was spotty.

Anyway, my primary use case is for OH’ing stuff. Therefore, I’m calling this dead simple app the OH machine, or OHm for short. I’m hoping it’ll be pretty easy to build, except maybe for the OAuth bit, which I can add after the conference.

Obviously, the tough part will be building a mobile app for it, but luckily, I’ll have a chance for that too, heading into Google I|O with a Droid.

Not that I’m switching, mind you.

Like OHm, my other ideas for Twitter apps scratch an itch, e.g. I really wanted a good contact manager app when I followed a bunch of new people.

So, what Twitter apps do you want to see? Maybe we can work on them at Chirp or afterwards. Maybe we can find someone working on them at Chirp. Maybe we can connect your idea with a developer at Chirp.

Lots of maybes in there.

Find the comments if you’re curious to see maybes turn into definites.