Those are the five new (or improved) things that have found their way onto TwitterSA in the last week. I’m still polishing them off (input boxes, and the like) but they work pretty well for now, so I figured I’d share them. They should be finished off by this weekend … boy, the interface is getting crowded. Anyway:

Stats

You can find them here. For now they’re pretty basic - total number of South African Twitter Users (that the service can find), total number of tweets cached in the local database, a graph of TwitterSA activity over the last 24 hours (will be generated tomorrow), and a list of the 20 noisiest Twits of all time, starting 1st July 2007. I plan to add an accelerometer-type thing (for tweets in the last hour), finish off that graph, and a few other things by this weekend.

Preferences

You can find these here. The options will be fleshed out over the coming week, to allow for number of tweets per page, avatar/font size, where links open, etcetera. For now, you can fill in your username (leave the @ out) to have tweets directed at you (or any that contain your username) highlight in yellow, and three further keywords that you’d like to track. This will come in handy when mini-avatars (16px*16px) are introduced, which will allow for many more tweets per page.

By the way: They’re cookie based.

Userpages

This is still a work-in-progress, which will rely on a few modifications to the database, planned for a later date. For now, a Userpage returns all the tweets made by that user, and that are cached in the TwitterSA database. Local caches are lekker, because they’re faster, and not prone to failwailing. Clicking the user’s avatar (or name) on a userpage will send you to that user’s Twitter.com page. To access the userpage for any particular user, simply click their name/avatar in the Live stream (still working on getting HTML up to speed).

Search

Search the TwitterSA cached tweets for a single keyword (multiple keyword function on the way). It runs a simple regular-expression search, and you can see it in action here (string: “27dinner”). Until I get the search box installed, you’ll have to construct the URL manually. Don’t get used to it, though ;)

Banter

By far the one I’m most proud of right now. This will be integrated into the Live stream at a later date, but for now, you can enter two usernames to see the messages exchanged between them on the public timeline. Please note that this will only work for users that are actually syndicated by TwitterSA. You can see it in action here (nicharry and jasonzoopy).

Apart from all these, I’m still working on cleaning up and streamlining the backend code (which so far is probably the ugliest PHP hack you’ve never seen), as well as adding more functionality to the databases. You may have noticed the Announcement tab on the main site (the white rectangle with the warning-triangle-exclamation in the background) - check it every now and then for updates, especially if something seems broken.

Remember to check out the TwitterSA Facebook Page (maybe add yourself ;), and to follow @twitsa if you’re not appearing on the TwitterSA timeline. Twitter finally brought following back, so I’ll get to adding all of you asap!