Dabr 2.0?
The other day I created a new Twitter account: @newdabr. I had a burst of creative thought and rushed some code to achieve this live demo. It really isn’t much to look at, but what the site is doing is a big improvement over the original @Dabr.
Storage
Dabr.co.uk stores nothing. Seriously. Well, ok, it logs visits like 99% of websites do on the net. It doesn’t store logins, users, tweets, settings, anything. That’s great in terms of cheaper hosting for me but it restricts what I can make the code do.
@newdabr is different. Very different. Every minute it asks Twitter: “Wazzup??” and stores the response in a database. While @dabr is slow and has to talk to Twitter with every click you make, @newdabr is super-snappy and just asks the local database.
Advantages
So we have this cool database, but how does that help? The list is pretty big and here’s just a few nice examples:
- Pages should load in milliseconds, not seconds.
- Never miss a tweet. @newdabr knows all and can maybe resume from where you were last reading.
- The site can happily auto-refresh.
- Notifications! Yes really.
- Contact grouping – think Tweetdeck columns.
- Expanded URLs. Want to know what a TinyURL really points to? I could cache the results and let you know.
- Persistent settings – e.g. contact groups, colours
- Filtering – e.g. hiding certain hashtags
- Interested in links or photos your friends posted today? @newdabr could list them all for easy access. e.g. sidebar of today’s Twitpics.
Disadvantages
Since @newdabr needs to keep chatting with Twitter all day to work, I imagine it would cost more to run and possibly wouldn’t work with tens or hundreds of accounts. For that reason, it’s going to be a slow-starting project with just me using it at first and a few alpha testers along the way.
Timeline
What’s one of those? Sorry, I’ve got no idea when I’ll work on it but I will keep updating the @newdabr Twitter account any time I make changes.
I’d love to be a tester!
I would too. I even use dabr for as desktop twitter client.
Another potential tester signing up!
David you’re a genius and would love to test for you. Please make all these pros check boxes in the app so I can turn them on or off.
Thanks,
Jeb
awesome. Would love to be an alpha tester :)
Actually it would work only if users can run their own version. Otherwise you will have too much of data to store. How much of history are you planning to store?
And BTW I forgot to thank you for open sourcing Dabr-v1
Sounds really great.
Contact Grouping sounds good – I never used tweetdeck.
Expanded URLs – fantastic idea, much more secure
Filtering – the big thing Twitter lacks is the ability to filter out hashtags, certain words (like election), and tweets with links to certain websites like Facebook and Reddit.
Hope you can make it a workable project.
I can help on the development if you’d like. Required skills should be no problem ;-)
Let me know if so, and how I could donate a few hours a week.