Yesterday afternoon I collaborated with Caterina Fake, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg to create WhuffieTracker. WhuffieTracker is an Web application that tracks your ego and citations from a variety of online sources. Our team’s idea was to combine all of the ways someone might be talking about you online, regardless of the discovery or publishing source, into one package you install on your own server to track your whuffie over time. The collaboration was part of a hackfest called Mash Pit.
WhuffieTracker prefers to consume information using RSS feeds corresponding to activity around a certain URL or, in a future version, could track the permalinks of individual entries.
The system would tabulate whuffie points for each area of possible input (blog whuffie, link whuffie, etc.) and also display a cumulative whuffie score.
In less than four hours yesterday afternoon our team brainstormed the product features, designed a site and a logo, researched possible sources of data, registered a domain name, setup and configured a database and server, created database schema, and wrote some PHP. We took some time away from our jobs at Technorati, Yahoo!, Fireant, and EVDB and applied our individual skills towards something we thought would benefit a large amount of people. The team will work on making the vision a reality in time for Mashup Camp next month.
Yahoo! took quick action to acquire WhuffieTracker for $20 and a latte but we turned down the offer. We expect our valuation will double after we add some JavaScript to the site. Just kidding. The code will eventually be set free for anyone to hack, tweak, and build upon when there is something more to show.
Whuffie sources
Blogs
- Technorati
- Google Blog Search
- Bloglines citations
- Yahoo! Blog Search
Tag/Flag sites
- Del.icio.us
- Digg
- Furl
- Yahoo! My Web
Other numerics
- Subscriber numbers (FeedBurner, online aggregators)
- Alexa
- Google PageRank
WhuffieTracker logo by Caterina Fake. Team photo by Chris Radcliff.