HashTweeps beta & why working with nerds is the best thing ever
What follows is an actual, factual true story and not made-up marketing schmaltz. I know that it’s true because it happened to me. This story will illustrate to you why working with nerds is roughly 97.6% cooler than working with any other kind of people.
After the smoke began to clear from the Overnight Website Challenge, Ali Karbassi and I were having a twitter-conversation about how we should totally make a list of all the people who tweeted about the event. Because, well, they are obviously the smartest, most interesting people on Twitter and we wanted to keep up with them.
Ali had the great idea about setting up a Google form and having people add their information.
But then Tom O’Neil (who works at The Nerdery as VP of Development) blew that great idea right out of the water. What he came up with was HashTweeps, which is in beta — but you can totally use it already. Tom, with design help from our own Karsten Lundquist (who should get props for doing this on his day off, and a day after the webchallenge), whipped this out in less than a day. It makes my head spin.
What HashTweeps does is let you search by hashtag and find all the people who were twittering using that term. HOW COOL IS THAT?
Sorry, I got a little carried away there. It’s just that my mind is still a little blown. Yesterday there was no solution to the problem (at least no solution that I knew of) and today there’s an awesome web app that let’s you quickly and easily see who is talking about you (or what you care about, or what you don’t care about). No more combing through pages and pages of Twitter search results with just the click of the search button, I can see all 215 people who tweeted about the webchallenge.
Besides making the branding folks and PR people weep with joy, HashTweeps really, fully illustrated why working with nerds is the best thing ever. With a few hours of programming, Tom made possible something I didn’t even consider possible.
And while I know, on at least a conceptual level, this is what we do at The Nerdery — making the designs and ideas of marketing and advertising agencies come to life on the web — experiencing it first hand is totally mind-blowing.
