The other day I launched MashupCrowd.com. It is a page that tracks who is talking about mashups on Twitter. I have been sitting on mashupcrowd.com and some other mashup .com domains for almost a year now, so it was about time to do something with (at least a few of) them. Inspired by svpt.nu – a very cool site that tracks Swedish Twitter users – I figured that I could do something similar but for mashups. That also gave me an excuse to finally dig into the Twitter API.

It was extremely easy to get the interaction with Twitter to work using Twitters super simple Search API. As a basis for my PHP code I used Simon Maddox’s Codeigniter Twitter library to speed up development even more. Basically the backend is nothing more than a cron job pinging Twitters Search API every few minutes for new tweets and then saving them in a database. Considering doing something more with this data at a later stage, but for now I just show it on the site. What took the most time was not figuring out how to use the Twitter API or to write the few lines of PHP needed. What took me time was to get the site to look good using CSS, but I am quite happy with the end result. Hopefully I can do some more of my own CSS work in the future.

MashupCrowd has already proved usefull for me in finding new innovative mashups. Today I found a cool use of Twitter to track the snow depth in the UK.