Welcome to the Random* Blog. This site is my online journal for my new(ish) sites: RandomTweets, RandomJaikus and RandomPownce.
Earlier this year I had fun working on a Twitter desktop app, TeleTwitter, with some fellow Telligenti. I began using Twitter and TeleTwitter and had fun doing so. Later I realized that I could use Twitter in another site that I built and run, WhatIWantMost, to post updates for users when they update their wishlist. While perusing the Twitter API, I took a look at the Twitter public timeline. I found that a couple of the recent entries were pretty funny, especially when taken out of context. I looked back through a few more and realized that amongst all the noise there were a few gems. I was intrigued and wondered what I could do to highlight those gems. I built a tool to randomly grab the 10 most recent updates at random intervals during the day. I found that I could take a few minutes at the end of the day, filter out the best ones, and rank them pretty easily. Next I built a simple site to display the daily results. I found a good domain name and posted the site, RandomTweets.com.
Since that time I found that the Jaiku API was very similar and as easy to use as the Twitter API so RandomJaikus.com was built. RandomPownce.com followed suit a couple of weeks ago. I've looked at a couple of other similar sites/tools, but none are as open or easy to use yet. I'll keep an eye out for any new similar sites that I can add to the mix. If you have any ideas for similar sites let me know at dhounshell [at] gmail . com.
Following is a brief history of the three sites.
October 2, 2007 - Launched RandomTweets.com
October 10, 2007 - Launched RandomJaikus.com
November 6, 2007 - Launched RandomPownce.com
I plan to post updates and feature additions that I make to the sites here and generally just keep everyone up to date. I hope you enjoy the sites and I hope this blog enhances your enjoyment. All feedback is welcome.
Thanks,
Dan
