[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Twitter crawler for app ideas
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Show HN: A Twitter crawler for app ideas
Author : mulhoon
Score : 109 points
Date : 2021-04-08 17:41 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iwishtherewas.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (iwishtherewas.app)
| harryf wrote:
| Wow this is fascinating just for the entertainment. Especially
| liked this one...
|
| > I need an app that sends me a notification 90 seconds before
| the sun reaches the exact position in the sky where it reflects
| off my neighbor's windows and blinds me.
|
| https://twitter.com/DanEngler/status/1379616188020318208
| ericcholis wrote:
| I feel like Shortcuts automation in iOS could do this.
| searchableguy wrote:
| It seems like most people need an app which tells them what apps
| already exist for the problem they are having. :D
| finexplained wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quixey
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| NLP has come quite a way since then, though the overlap with
| Google's functionality makes it seem like a losing idea
| regardless.
| dk-ox21 wrote:
| Wait long enough and you'll see some kid at a hackathon posting
| "I wish there was an app for splitting the bill with my
| friends..."
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| "I've got to do a letter drop across 30+ local addresses. Is
| there an app that can plan the optimal route?" well,we still need
| a bit of research for this...
| scrollaway wrote:
| Getting XKCD/1425 vibes off this one :)
| PullJosh wrote:
| Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
|
| Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
|
| > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from
| contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business
| name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my
| phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future
| maintenance calls.
|
| https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
|
| > I need an app that'll remind me when my cards are about to
| expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
|
| https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
|
| Together these might form an interesting app idea.
| jjice wrote:
| Maybe I'm old school, but this seems like something that would
| take upwards of five minutes to add to my calendar and wouldn't
| require a whole other account + login.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah I find that calendar and a free-form note app cover
| pretty much everything "miscellaneous" on my phone. The only
| other apps I really use are maps, contacts, email, and web
| browser.
| mrpetruccio wrote:
| > Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
|
| > Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
|
| > > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from
| contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business
| name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my
| phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future
| maintenance calls.
|
| > https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
|
| > > I need an app that'll remind me when my cards are about to
| expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
|
| > https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
|
| > Together these might form an interesting app idea.
|
| > Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
|
| > Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
|
| > > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from
| contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business
| name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my
| phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future
| maintenance calls.
|
| > https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
|
| > > I need an app that'll remind me when my cards are about to
| expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
|
| > https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
|
| > Together these might form an interesting app idea.
| RileyJames wrote:
| There are so many B2B apps that will do the first one. It's
| called job management, and it's a massive product category. But
| none of it is as simple as 'download this app and take a photo'
| because every business is slightly different.
|
| And while your app could start so simple, and perfectly aligned
| with their use case, next they'll want something else, and
| you'll want more customers, so the customisation options begin.
| Until it's so complicated to get it to do anything that it
| requires a consultant to set it up.
|
| But will they really pay for it? Because at present they've
| chosen to tweet rather than google. And google + money would
| have solved this already.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "What the fuck do I need to do to stop seeing feet on my timeline
| why do people keep posting them? Is there an app that blocks all
| feet? Send help not feet"
|
| _helpless giggling_
| bprasanna wrote:
| Imho there should be voting button (up/down) to see which app
| idea is the need of the hour.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I paid for the 30x500 course (so far not worth it :-( ... it
| anyway the point of the whole thing is to first identify your
| audience, then find where they hang out online and then do this
| kind of research.
|
| This _coukd_ be linked up with Rand Fishkin 's new thing where he
| has found a million people's twitter bios and linkedin bios and
| can therefore find "people who post a lot about sailing and work
| in finance".
|
| But honestly, it casts a wide net and I think I need to niche
| down.
| boyter wrote:
| Why have you found 30x500 not worth it so far?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Ah, they are catching on!
| https://twitter.com/dr0dil/status/1380230776017534980
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| This is great. Many years ago (5 or 6?) I started pulling down
| any tweet that had the phrase "there should be an app..." and
| saving to a database daily with the idea of making something
| similar to this. The script is still running and I have about
| 40,000 tweets saved. I think I'll pick it back up, thanks for the
| inspiration!
| Budabellly wrote:
| For MVP you could just have a bot account that retweets!
| macando wrote:
| Enriching the responses with demographic data, extracting
| interesting features with NLP and then clustering against those
| features could give you some good insights.
|
| I.e. Millennials in Belgium are not happy with their toy stores.
| mulhoon wrote:
| I spent a few hours building this. I'd love to hear your
| thoughts.
| asdev wrote:
| What's the tech stack behind it? Just curious, it takes me
| days/weeks to get any ideas out due to tech choice paralysis
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| Looks like Nuxt/Vue sitting on S3 with CloudFront as CDN.
| Presumably with some script on the backend to update the list
| of Tweets on S3.
|
| /vaguely informed guessing
| mulhoon wrote:
| Yup, It's one simple lambda function that reads the JSON
| file from S3, searches twitter for new tweets since the
| latest, appends new ones and writes back to S3. Cron'd
| every minute.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| You should go one level of abstraction further and make a site
| where users can aggregate arbitrary twitter search queries like
| this. AFAIK you can't actually "follow" a search query or
| hashtag on twitter.
| bckr wrote:
| I think this is pretty cool and a great idea. One thing that I
| ran into within a couple minutes is that there are several
| entries that don't have enough context. It will just say
| something like "is there an app?".
| fransiscoli wrote:
| This is awesome! It would also be really nice if the scraper
| would organize the ideas based on keywords in a given tweet.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I _love_ this and have bookmarked it for daily review.
|
| If I can make one recommendation, add a search function. That
| way users can find all the recommendations that touch on some
| field that's important to them.
|
| For example, I'm working on an app for ebook authoring. It
| would be awesome to search through these for any ebook related
| app requests. It could help me to spot patterns related to my
| field, and give me ideas not just for apps but for features.
|
| If I can make a second recommendation, make those search
| results subscribe-able... like a Google Alerts for Twitter-
| based app requests.
| josefresco wrote:
| As someone who built a website called (roughly) "$5 business
| ideas" about 12 years ago this gives me great joy! It was
| mostly satire but still fun to build and populate with terrible
| ideas.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Aha amazing! I've been wanting this for ages. I wrote about this
| exact idea on reddit a year or so ago but never launched
|
| So props on launching!!
|
| (mid way through this comment, ctrl+f for twitter for easy find)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/bvlv3q/does_any...
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| Pretty cool and fun to read through.
|
| If I can make one suggestion: make clicking any part of the Tweet
| card element go to the Tweet in context. That's the main action I
| will want to take, so it's a little annoying that it's relegated
| to one small link in the top right.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Ideas are the easy part.
| ozten wrote:
| I don't think this happens frequently enough to make it viable...
| but
|
| I think the other missing piece is App creators could register
| for problems that they solve and then your bot replies and says
| "There is an app for X <link to app store>"
| tobr wrote:
| In other words, you wish there was an app for telling you there
| is an app for something you wish there was an app for?
| josefresco wrote:
| My favorite:
|
| hayo @red_hayonnaise
|
| I want an app that takes me on a timed, random drive; like I
| wanna drive around for an hour, map me a course that winds
| backroads and brings me back home in that timeframe
| RileyJames wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I wanted a similar app, but A to B, rather than round trips.
|
| Best I could do with the majors is disable highways & toll
| roads, but often it would still try to take similar routes.
|
| BJ Landcruiser tops out at ~120k, and who wants to go in
| straight lines on highways. More fun to try and find a fire
| road it can't get down. Still searching.
| karussell wrote:
| Maybe the custom routing from GraphHopper is what you want:
| https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2020/05/31/examples-for-
| cus...
|
| You can eg. avoid primary roads additionally to motorways and
| tolls.
|
| (note, I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper)
|
| Not only for car but also for motorcycle, bike, walking, ...
|
| Can be further tweaked with preferring/avoiding curvy roads
| or elevation.
|
| And GraphHopper also supports round trips.
| megablast wrote:
| Can there be anything more destructive to society?? The
| pollution, the micro plastics, the chance of killing someone.
| tyingq wrote:
| Random driving was the only thing that would make my kids go
| to sleep when they were babies and feeling cranky. I'm not
| sorry for doing it :)
| offtop5 wrote:
| By that logic we should all be driving Priuses. People buy
| cars for recreational all the time.
| geranim0 wrote:
| Maybe the guy wants to go on a ride because he's about to
| kill his wife? He may do something worse if he doesn't get
| his ride.
| economusty wrote:
| When I see comments like yours I think to myself, "this
| person better ride a bicycle to work to feel it appropriate
| to pontificate like this"
| scrollaway wrote:
| GPS doesn't have to only be used by cars.
|
| Save your breath for useful activism such as electric cars,
| cycling and renewables. Shaming people for having a good time
| is pointless and counterproductive.
| xwdv wrote:
| Yes. Far more destructive.
| robohoe wrote:
| This would be spectacular if it could find fun/twisty roads
| nearby, similar to https://www.motorcycleroads.com.
| ENOTTY wrote:
| I've used Twistypedia to learn about such roads
| https://www.twistypedia.com/
| mdoms wrote:
| "Crawler" implies it follows links, this looks like it just
| performs keyword searches right?
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| NLP would make this much better, try to categorize and provide
| some statistics what people are talking about!
| tyingq wrote:
| _" I wish there was an app like find my iPhone but "find my
| glasses" because fuckers keep getting lost"_
|
| Argh, can relate. Terrible catch-22 when you can't see well
| enough to find your glasses. Also, for reasons I don't
| understand, my wife owns a zillion pairs of cheap readers that
| sort of look like my glasses.
| thrill wrote:
| My version of this app would start with "what's that on the top
| of your head"?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| shoto_io wrote:
| Nice. It also catches things that are not app ideas, but
| interesting. Like:
|
| _" Is there an app that you hate but always use?"_
|
| YES! Instagram. I hate the app. But I have to use it for business
| purposes.
| ovnz wrote:
| Can we have RSS there, please?
| arkitaip wrote:
| This is fun and super useful. Some low quality tweets could
| easily be discarded, though.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Hey, self plugging my project - https://needgap.com A problem
| validation platform which serves similar purpose as OP but bit
| more nuanced as the problem statements need to be well defined
| and the QC is high.
| Natfan wrote:
| "Is there an app that can find the biggest dick near me that can
| fuck me good "
|
| Sounds like someone wants an upgrade to Tinder/Grindr.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Or maybe Grindr. Do we know?
| harryf wrote:
| It's interesting to consider what the impact would be on
| society if Tinder had public reviews...
| [deleted]
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