Emergent game on twitter

I've been approached by a local artist working on emergent game «Σ». I've built another bot, which uses the twitter api to search for twitterers located in the emergent game, then uses the XMPP interface to make a private account follow them.

Then we chuck the 'with friends' feed through a yahoo pipe, for two reasons.

I'm pretty sure twitter needs you to be authenticated to see the 'with friends' feed. Yahoo pipes has a 'private string' object, so we can (safely?) embed a username and password in the feed url.

If (when) there's a parsing error in the bot, the yahoo pipe can filter the private accounts own updates, so we effectively get a 'just friends' feed.

Which gets displayed on the game blog thus.

motorway junction geocoder

It's a yahoo pipe, which for some major subset of UK motorways, takes the motorway and junction numbers, and returns a geo thing.

This came out of an idea I've mentioned here, and which Ive since discovered is the basis of this product.

But while I was playing around, I realised that none of the big mapping providers do this - or at least I couldn't get them to. Perhaps you'll do better than me, "M6 Junction 6" always landed me in Manchester. Not where I wanted to be.

So I searched, and searched, and found a couple of GPS waypoint files listing UK motoroway junctions. None of them in any kind of useful format. Still, where there's a will...

So out comes gpsbabel, and a few 'tests' later, I've got a GPX file, which works. The rest of the pipe is about getting the XML structure to work.

It doesn't do much, but as far as I know it's the only one of it's kind, and it does do what it's supposed to.

I'm pretty pleased with meself, me.

Brummie Twits

@peteashton and @BhamPostJoanna wondered " Is it possible to get a feed for twitters from a specific city?".

@aeioux pointed out http://twittermap.com

Twittermap, while it relies on twitterers twittering their location, gives results according to where twitterers are / were recently.

This yahoo pipe instead searches a twitterers' friends (any twitterer whose friends you can view) for the location in their profile. So the result is not 'live', but reflects where the friends are based.

Here's a first hack using yahoo pipes. The page parameter is for when there's more than 100 friends to deal with.