tunnelvision - a twitter filter

tunnelvision is a group of perl scripts and library code to deal with fetching, storing, categorising and rebroadcasting tweets.

This is better (for me, anyway) than a simple iPhone or OS X twitter client because I can program it to do other, cleverer, things than just show me tweets. For example:

• mark things as "seen", so I don't end up reading the same tweet over again on different devices
• mail a summary of the things I might deem important that I haven't seen recently for those periods when I am not paying attention
• send tweets that mention me, or new results for a saved search, straight to my phone as an alert using Prowl
• "snooze" a user doing something distasteful (such as liveblogging an event I am not interested in), rather than unfollow and have to remember to refollow later
• roll up tweets that mention the same URL (a la retweeting)

Do note that whilst I am running this code 24/7 for myself, it is not documented (other than this readme) and probably not ready for prime-time just yet. To illustrate, it currently expects to run out of the check-out directory.

Broad architecture

Conceptually, tunnelvision is split into three distinct types of code:

• Collectors: fetch new tweets from Twitter and save them to the database
• Classifiers: categorise new tweets according to priority, spamminess, group, etc.
• Circulators: broadcast tweets back to me, either directly (eg. via Prowl) or in the form of a website

Pre-requisites

Database

tunnelvision uses CouchDB to store tweets. It currently expects to connect to 'localhost' on the standard port and use a database called 'twitter'.

CPAN modules

I am using a lot of external CPAN modules in this project.

• Moose
• MooseX::FollowPBP
• MooseX::Method::Signatures
• Net::Twitter
• AnyEvent::Twitter::Stream
• DB::CouchDB
• Plack
• ... and many more (this list is definitely not complete)

If you are playing with this, I recommend installing any CPAN modules with the truly excellent cpanm script, like so:

sudo cpanm Moose MooseX::FollowPBP MooseX::Method::Signatures 
           Net::Twitter AnyEvent::Twitter::Stream DB::CouchDB 
           Plack ...

TODO

Finish writing the code (the more verbose todo list is kept in tunnelvision.taskpaper).