Twitter / Flickr Integration
This is an idea I've had for several years - use Twitter to identify trends, what people are tweeting about, and then get images from Flickr to provide a visual impression.
Last Saturday, I decided to try it.
Both Twitter and Flickr have great APIs, so it didn't take long to connect into Twitter's API and get the trends, then search for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and display the images.
By didn't take long, I mean I stayed up all night. It was grand fun. I haven't stayed up all night to pursue an idea in a very long time.
The initial results were both encouraging and disappointing. Since many of the Twitter trends were hashtags, they didn't correlate well to the Flickr content. My daughter reminded me that you can request trends without hashtags, so I did. The results came back much better. After further reflection I realized sending the whole set of words to Flickr may be more efficient, but it made it more difficult to control the result set. The goal was to have one image for each word, from the country identified by the trend. Finally, I also found that it is possible that even though a word is a Twitter trend, there may not be an image tagged with both the trend and the country, so a second search is run at Flickr if there are not enough images for the trends in the country. It also holds the results of the searches,
I used Isotope to display the image, that was very cool.
Most importantly, I had fun. I learned new stuff.