Wii friend codes from Twitter
As most Nintendo Wii owners know by now, Mario Kart for Wii shipped last week. I put together yet another friend code database to track and share codes, but this one is unique because it builds on Twitter. Just follow @wii and send your friend code in a reply. No registration, no data entry. All your friends on Twitter who also use the system will automatically be linked, so you can quickly get a view of which friend codes to add. It's also a great way to discover new Twitter users.
I'm pretty happy with how the implementation has worked out. It's build on essentially three background scripts:
- Parsing replies every minute looking for the friend code pattern (1234-1234-1234 for game codes, with dashes or spaces).
- Taking queued users and pulling everyone they are following into the database.
- Generating and caching the RSS feed for recently tweeted friend codes.
The system currently only pulls the first 300 followers, but it's running smoothly enough that I will bump that up to 500 this week. Over 150 people are currently using it, and the database has about 10,000 records to keep track of friends. I feel like it's architected well enough to grow significantly from here, so I may do some casual promotion of the service this week.
If you own a Wii and use Twitter, give it a try. If you have any questions or feature requests, please send me an email or reply on Twitter. Enjoy!
May 4, 2008 10:32 PM [link] -
