Here’s a video and description of the prototype I whipped up yesterday.
Collaborative creativity using Twitter and Microsoft’s Multi-Touch Surface.
This is a one-day prototype exploring the possibilities of connecting the ubiquity of Twitter with the single-location Microsoft Surface.
It’s basically collaborative magnetic poetry. Any user can add words to be used by replying to @touchPoetry on Twitter. Users on the Surface drag words around to form poems and encircle them to create an outgoing “tweet” on the touchPoetry twitter account.
Along the way, I figured out SSH, learned to install things via the shell (including Python modules), figured out how to use Cron jobs (for periodic events), and figured out the basics of the python-twitter API.
What follows is a fairly dry look at how I did it with almost no prior knowledge beyond Python and navigating with a terminal line.