Overlapr is a mini-app I wrote yesterday morning to display commonalities between Twitter users, starting with common followers and common friends.
I’d been wanting to write an experimental Twitter app for a while now, and although I’d had the idea for Overlapr some time ago, I was recently re-inspired by three other Twitter mini-apps: DoesFollow by The Dude himself — Damon Clinkscales, Followerlap by Eric Meyer, and TwitterCompare by Corey Grusden.
Current features include smart, bookmarkable URLs (like this one, comparing Gruber and Zeldman), and cached data for faster responses. I’m working on a few new features, like displaying the detailed follower listing (which is trickier than it sounds), and additional overlaps.
I hope you like using Overlapr as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you have ideas for how I can improve it, let me know.
Technical Details
Overlapr is written in Sinatra, delivered by Phusion Passenger, and uses SQLite for database storage. I manage the source code with Mercurial via BitBucket and deploy with Capistrano.
These technologies helped engender one of the fastest idea-to-development-to-deployment experiences I’ve had in over 20 years of software development.
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Michael Jackson
08 July 2009 at 2:05 pm
Interesting that you should mention how you built the thing. I’m also a huge fan of the Sinatra/SQLite/Capistrano combination for the reason you described. Just curious: What did you use to connect to the database? ActiveRecord? DataMapper?
Andrew Jaffe
08 July 2009 at 6:58 pm
Dan-
I wrote a similar tool (but in python, command-line only) and actually couldn’t work out the best way to deal with it. I was wondering how you ended up doing it.
One version uses statuses/friends for each user; this is in inefficient but only uses a couple of calls.
The other one does a call to friends/ids or followers/ids and then a sequence of users/show; this uses less bandwidth but more calls.
I’ve been meaning to put a web front end on this but never got round to it…
Andrew
Dave Trosdahl
02 November 2009 at 7:08 pm
I realize this isn’t really the place to make this comment, but I just wanted to say thanks for the free image rotator code. It works beautifully on my site. It even allows me to do some SEO things with the title, alt tags, folder name and even the image name. Thanks, again! - Dave