At my current place of employment we spend a lot of time and energy gearing up for large trade show events the likes of FITC, SXSW and the AMA. We typically have a prominently situated booth where we engage with event-goers and try to make some new connections. During the latest trade show endeavor, we had an idea to create a contest where people would Tweet about their worst creative transgressions using a Twitter hash tag, (#digitalshame), to track the contestants. We wanted to have an engaging way to stream and display the live feed so other event-goers would be compelled to participate as well.

I had seen some pretty cool online apps that could animate a Twitter feed but none of them offered much flexibility in way of branding or marketing. So I took the opportunity to dust off my old Actionscripting gloves and get my hands dirty with some code. With some minimal research, I quickly found a powerful text animation library for AS3 called Textanim. That looked like it would make my text animations look about as slick as deer guts on a door knob!

I still had no idea how I was going to pull from a specific Twitter feed. Then I stumbled up this guy's blog example and source code and I figured I had this project half in the bag! With a couple days worth of tinkering around in OOP territory and playing around with classes, I quickly had a working proof of concept. The biggest challenge was figuring out a way to animate each of the Tweets in an optimized way that wouldn't make the computer melt after playing the animation for a few minutes. The other major hurdle was to create a method for being able to pull in brand new tweets as the occurred as this was supposed to be a "live" Twitter experience. The best solution I could come up with was pull as many tweets as possible, cycle through them completely, and at the end of the cycle, ping the Twitter api again for more Tweets, essentially just overwriting the existing object with the new one. I'm sure there was a smarter way to go about this but unfortunately I only had a few days to write, test, and deploy before the deadline, (nothing like a massively attended event to act as the most effective project deadline).

Anyway, enough talk, here's the end result:

This example is just pulling my personal Twitter feed, but you can modify the variables in the Twitter class to point to whatever Twitter search string you need. You can also play with the timing of the animations as well as come up with your very own animations by modifying the "TextEffects.as" class that resides in the source files. One possible improvement would be to create even more intro and outro animations and add them to the mix.

Please feel free to use the code in whatever fashion you see fit, obviously a little shout back @chromaloop would be appreciated if you choose to use it commercially.

You can check out the source code here!