Eric Chapweske and I are pleased to announce Twistr, the mashup than answers the question: what happens when you combine Twitter messages with Flickr photos?
The results are frequently nonsensical or downright stupid. But sometimes they are simply sublime:
Check out the site and vote for your favorites. The cream should rise to the top.
Twistr is powered by the Twitter Search API (using JSON), and the Flickr API using flickr_fu. The photos are mashed up using ImageMagick. The photos themselves are all Creative Commons Attribution licensed, which makes this possible. Thanks photographers!
I’ve wanted to create a mashup for a while, and Twistr was inspired by Twistori, Oh My Science, and Get Hoffed. The site is hosted on Dreamhost with Phusion Passenger (which is a story in itself).
Since creating Twistr, I’ve since come across a couple of other similar projects. LOLCanvas is a bookmarklet that will LOLify any Flickr image with a random message. Meanwhile flolcatr is almost the exact same idea, but they don’t say where they get the text from.
I wrote something similar back in January – http://www.culann.com/2008/01/getting-back-to-the-fun
I took my friends’ twitter feed, ran it through a lolcat translator, and dropped the text onto puppy photos ranked by interestingness. It’s like cotton candy development.
Cool! I like your approach because the messages tend to make more “sense” as LOLcats.