TweetBoner: The Tumblr

Today, we’re introducing a little API for TweetBoner.biz. It’s really simple — just add “/json” to the URL for a person’s TweetBoners and you’ll get their TweetBoners back as a valid JSON array. You can use it in your apps, your projects, your widgets, and your websites. It’s really easy to use.

Witness, as we use just a few lines of Python to get @lonelysandwich’s TweetBoners and print out their usernames and how many times @lonelysandwich has faved them!

import urllib2
import json

url = "http://tweetboner.biz/lonelysandwich/json"

req = urllib2.urlopen(url)
jsonData = json.loads(req.read())
for user in jsonData:
    print user['username'] + ": ",
    print str(user['numberOfFaves']) + " faves"

We get:

ladybirdj:  9 faves
biorhythmist:  8 faves
atencio:  7 faves
daveshumka:  7 faves
mrgan:  6 faves
...<snip>...
Moltz:  1 faves
DrLabRatOry:  1 faves
noahkalina:  1 faves
communicatrix:  1 faves
kzzxt:  1 faves

Over at TB.biz, we’ve got a page with some more information, a couple of examples (in Python and JQuery) to get you up and running, and details on exactly what you can get out of our API. This is all totally free — if you use the API, all we ask is that you link to TB from somewhere on your site or in your project.

To start with, we’ve only made an API for the TweetBoners feature of our website. If you’re a developer and you’d like to put some of TweetBoner’s other features into your app, just ask — I’m sure we can figure something out.

We can’t wait to see what people might do with our new API. Give it a try.

All through TweetBoner’s development, there was a question we kept asking ourselves (and imagined that our users, if they ever existed, would ask):

Why use TweetBoner to discover new users when I can just use the Tweeteorites or Favstar leaderboards for the same thing?

A lot of people use the Favstar and Tweeteorites leaderboards to discover new people to follow. If we wanted to provide that kind of service, we needed to give people a compelling reason to switch. Ideally, we wanted to do discovery better than those leaderboards. And we think we did. Here’s why.

Leaderboards are based on everyone’s taste, and you don’t necessarily have the same taste as everyone.

Think of the Twitter faving situation in terms of the iTunes Music Store. The front page of the iTunes Music Store shows you a list of the top-selling songs:

That stuff’s just not for me, so the Top Songs chart in iTunes isn’t very useful to me. The leaderboards on Favstar or Tweeteorites don’t give me a very high return rate, for the same reason — it’s usually stuff that I’m not personally into. For example, there’s a thing on Tweeteorites where whenever Smashing Magazine tweets a list of 135 exciting new ways to launch Firefox or whatever, it shoots straight onto the leaderboard. Not that that’s a bad thing. But still. I don’t want to see it.

Leaderboards ask “What does everyone like? What’s the most popular stuff?” Sometimes, that question doesn’t give me (and by extension, us) very good answers. So TweetBoner decided to ask some different questions.

Contrast the front page of the iTunes Music Store with something like¹ Ping. From the keynote:

You get a custom top-ten chart of songs and albums that are customised to be what only the people you follow are downloading from iTunes. It’s a custom chart of all the stuff the people you follow are downloading from iTunes. Just for you.

Now we’re talking. Tell me what the people I care about are checking out. Tell me what my friends like. What gets you more excited — the Billboard Hot 100, or having your friend tell you about that great band they saw a few days ago? By customizing our recommendations just for you, we think we provide a better discovery service than the leaderboards.

See if you agree with us.

¹oh god I hope I don’t regret making this analogy

Do you like to order off-menu? We hear you.

Starting today, you can add any Twitter user¹ to your Casting Couch — not just a person from your recommendations. So, if there’s a Twitter person you heard about from somewhere other than TweetBoner, now you can give them the Casting Couch treatment.

To try it out, head over to http://tweetboner.biz/casting/add, throw a username in the box, and push the button. That person will now be on your Casting Couch.

In addition, we’ve got a neat little thing where if you specify a username in the URL (for example, http://tweetboner.biz/casting/add/ryhei for our own Mr. Ryan Heise), the “username” field on the page will be auto-filled with that username. So you can give people a one-click way to add you to their Casting Couch².

¹: with a public account, duh

²: Protip: you can also do that with promotions — http://tweetboner.biz/promotions/lucaswagner is a one-click way to promote Mr. Lucas Wagner

It’s Tumblr Tuesday, and we’d love it if you’de take a second to go check your casting couch.

Done? Cool. Now come back to Tumblr and please throw us a vote under the startups category. We want to grow TweetBoner, and we can only do it with your help!

Thanks!