entwin.es

This project is tagged under: web

18 Jun 2013

Entwines is a Twitter-based news gathering service simple enough for anyone to investigate and report any story that interests them.

I followed a number of stories such as a shooting incident in Denver as well as a New York snowstorm and discovered that in order to monitor the event, I had to use a variety of tools and applications such as Twitter, Tweetdeck, tumblr and Google Reader. From here I wanted to simplify the process.

I wanted to make social news gathering easier and open. Millions of tweets are posted daily and who knows what we maybe missing out on. I wanted to make that easier.

My early versions were just passive news reading determined by the site which was tedious and boring. I then decided to take a more active approach. News sites are essentially static until an editor decides to update the story or the page it will remain that way.

Using the Twitter API I wanted to compare verified twitter accounts and hashtags which led to a much more active page.

In this setup it was much easier to read updated events and statements from officials regarding emergency advisories and public sentiment to it.

User Scenario The user enters a Twitter account and a search tag to compare it to.

Implementation The site is built on node.js using express.js, twit.js, underscore.js, mongoose.js, hosted on Heroku and Mongodb.

Try out entwines.

Presented at the ITP Spring Show and ITP Thesis Week.