Webstrong Ltd

Today we’re launching a new Twitter app called Twission.

Twission is a simple extension of Twitter Search that shows the degrees of separation between you and the people in the results. It also has a smooth ajax auto refresh feature so when new content comes in, you see it straight away.

Essentially it’s a social add-on that makes the results from Twitter Search more meaningful to you. We think you’ll pay more attention to a tweet from someone you follow, or someone that follows someone you follow. It’s a little bit like the idea behind the trivia game six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Only with Twission, you get to see how many degrees there are between your own follow network and the people in the results.

Some Caveats

Right now though, the service isn’t as useful as it could be as it only highlights people in the search results that you already follow. This is because of some inconsistencies between the Twitter Search API and the main Twitter API which have prevented us from enabling the ‘friend of a friend’ filter. Twitter have said that they’re working on this issue and that it should be fixed in the next major release of the API. So when that happens, we’ll be ready to turn on the more interesting features of Twission.

Full Load Transparency

Because of the (temporary) way in which we need to access the Twitter API, the service is quite heavy in the number of calls needed to be made to the Twitter API. So, to alleviate any possible frustration around this, we display the current load of the app on the system whenever it’s running.

Twission is a whitelisted Twitter App, but even still we thought it would be interesting for you guys to see how many users there are on the system and how many calls it’s making to the Twitter API.

Perfect for Live Events

Twitter Search comes into it’s own during a live event or when something is on TV that a lot of people are watching. The hashtag convention means that anyone can watch something on TV and read live comments from other people watching the same thing.

With Twission, this should become even more useful because of it’s follower filters and automatic refreshes. So with that in mind (and apologies to any overseas readers), Dragon’s Den is on tonight on RTE 1 at 10:15pm. The hashtag is #ddire. Why not give Twission a go while you’re watching it? It’ll be easier then using Twitter Search.