Neatweet · May 22, 10:54 by Shannon Wynter

Greetings one and all.

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I’ve been working on a pet project called Neatweet (actually it’s had a dozen different names, but good luck finding a combination of Twitter app name, domain name, and Google app engine name that isn’t taken).

Neatweet is a service that lets you filter incoming status updates from twitter to your chosen Twitter client using basic allow & deny rules.

For example, you follow a group of people, some of them keep tweeting Spymaster game information, others tweeting Foursquare annoyances, these are your friends and otherwise post plenty of great tweets so you don’t want to unfollow them.

To make this example a little more complicated, lets add that you’re following a news station who posts really useful information on public transport disruptions, but otherwise posts great heaping helping of generally useless information.

Allow
Keywords that are part of your public transport interests, for example here it’s Queensland Rail or QR so the rules allow rule is simply.

• text: qr

Deny
Pretty much all of the news source is rubbish so lets just block it entirely.

• screen_name: cnn

Spymaster and Foursquare both use their own applications so we can block by source

• source: spymaster

• source: foursquare

It’s that simple, there’s even a wizard interface on the site that makes it a bit easier to define rules, it’s almost point and click.

Notice how we didn’t define any rules to allow all?

If a tweet matches an allow rule it’s instantly approved and never gets checked by deny rules.
If a tweet doesn’t match an allow rule it’s then checked by each deny rule in turn, if it matches no deny rule it is allowed by default.

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