I built a tool that could put you in jail 😏

Well, I may be exaggerating a bit. But stealing IS a crime... Let me explain.

Since I started my journey on Twitter, I have been interested in finding which content works when you are building a startup. One good way to find out is checking what are the top accounts on the space doing.

But unless you scroll down until the start of their timeline and write down the stats of each tweet, there is no way to get their best tweets. And that gave me an idea.

What if there was a tool in which you could put a Twitter username and you would get their top tweets ordered by likes, retweets, ... for FREE?

So I got to work. The name came pretty easy: Tweet Thief. I wanted something a bit direct. The building process was divided in two phases. But both of them had something in common: I would reuse as much code as I could from previous projects (especially from my main product called Shrtcat).

The back end involved basically using Twitter's API. The tool needs to pull all tweets of an account while being aware of rate limits. Using sessions in combination with Twitter tokens, I came up with a pretty simple error handling.

The design of the UX was basically built with Vanilla JS and Bootstrap 5. I could have used something fancier, but the simplicity of the interface made it very tempting to use something kind of old school.

But then, why do I say that this tool could put you in jail? Given the name and all the puns made, it could feel that the tool allows you to steal tweets from anyone you want. It is not the case: Intellectual property theft is a crime. Tweet Thief is meant to be used as inspiration and to notice trends using the best content of your favourite Twitter accounts.

I hope you liked the story. If you want to support Tweet Thief, I'm sharing the updates of the Product Hunt launch here:

Cheers!