Hi everyone!
I'm a long-time lurker here. I wanted to share something that I've been working on for the past couple of months.
ThreadRoll is a near-real-time feed of threads from your Twitter feed. It lets you browse threads in chronological order as well as sort them based on the total number of likes and retweets or an "engagement score". You can also filter by date range and the minimum length of a thread.
I started this project somewhat by accident. A few months ago, I stumbled across some excellent threads and started wondering if there was an easy way to extract them using the Twitter API. It turned out not to be a straightforward exercise (although v2 of the API should make it somewhat easier), so I write some JavaScript code that:
That was an interesting exercise, and I decided to build a simple UI on top of it. One thing led to another, and I ended up getting sucked into a rabbit hole of different API endpoints, optimising my code and building a caching logic to avoid hitting Twitter's rate limits.
I wouldn't call the site anywhere near "ready" just yet. There is plenty to improve, especially when it comes to the UI and UX, which is not something I've had prior experience with. However, it's at a point where I myself log into it quite often to find good content, so I figured I'd share it with the community.
At the moment, it costs me $0 to run as I'm using a mix of free tiers from Vercel, Heroku and MongoDB Atlas. I'll start hitting the limits quite soon, though, particularly for MongoDB. I'd love to be able to monetise it in some way eventually. I've been contemplating a paid plan with extra features, but I'm struggling to think of something that delivers enough value worth paying for. Some thoughts I've had:
In any case, I'll keep streamlining the site over the coming months. Worst case, I'll have to start deleting older threads from the database, to stay within the free tier limits.
Take a look and let me know what you think. Go easy on me — it's the first thing I've ever put out to a wider audience. 😄
Cheers,
Hi Siim,
Congrats on getting the MVP out. I know as a developer that is a milestone worth celebrating. I checked out your site and I agree with others it doesn't give me much info/incentive to click the log in button. I suggest getting a clear elevator pitch down and posting on your site. Your post here really reads like a developer, your opening paragraph lists out the technical features, which is nice. But as a user I'd like to see the one-two sentence summary that tells me why this is better than using twitter's advanced search. Does it provide alerts? So the value is "stop constantly searching in the twitter API just get alerts when your criteria is hit"? Seems like you touch on this in your possible pay options, maybe pick one of those and add it to your site.
I think a helpful model can be the browser extension summaries for firefox. For example https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ it has all the info I want as a user
Anyway I hope this is helpful feedback. I really like the idea of finding more interesting conversations on twitter.
Thanks for taking the time to give actionable feedback!
I'm aware of the shortcomings of the home page and I'll hopefully have some time to work on it over the Christmas break. The resources you've linked to will be a big help for sure.
This is hella cool Siim (great name btw)
I created a tool to help Tweeters create Twitter threads: Spread
Potential partnership down the road? ;)
Sure, I'm open to suggestions but will probably have to do a fair bit of work on my site first. 🙂
The homepage tells nothing about the product. Would have liked to see examples and features. Interesting product though.
Thanks, yes I agree. I really haven't been focusing on the home page at all (yet).
That's one of the next things on the list. I've been thinking of separating the landing page from the main app (it's currently all a single Next.js site) and use a no-code page builder for that.