Overlapr: Find your Twitter commonalities
Web-apps that utilize the Twitter API are a dime a dozen these days, thanks to the micro-blogging services skyrocketing popularity.
Dan Benjamin has just joined the mix with his own creation: Overlapr. Overlapr is an easy way to find out how many followers (or friends) overlap across two Twitter accounts. Enter in two Twitter usernames and you can easily see how many followers they share and with one click, find out how many friends they share as well.
Overlapr is similar to other Twitter apps like DoesFollow, Followerlap and TwitterCompare, but it is unique in that it lets you view the overlap numbers for both followers and friends.
On the main Overlapr page, you can see recent and most popular overlaps, and the results are often hilarious. The results use a smart URL, like http://overlapr.com/friends/film_girl/downloadsquad.
Because of limitations of the Twitter API (which you can see with TwitterCompare), Overlapr doesn’t currently list which followers or friends you have in common. That’s a shame, but there can still be value (even if it’s just entertainment), in comparing the raw numbers. For instance, if I have multiple accounts — say, one for me, and one for my podcast, it might be interesting to see how many friends/followers overlap. That way, I can know not to retweet too many items, lest my friends become annoyed.
An interesting aspect of this project was how quickly it was created. Dan took it from concept to the initial version is just an hour of time. Two more hours of work over the next two days yielded much of the version you see right now. So in three hours, a fully functional small web application was built and the agile nature of its development (using the Ruby framework Sinatra and other open source tools for deployment and source control) means updates and maintenance will be fast as well.
