As a lot of other people, I’m watching the debate of the Digital Economy Bill on BBC Parliament tonight. I’m also trying to follow along with some of the #debill back-channel on twitter.
With such a heated and interesting commentary on twitter, it reminded me of Roo’s “Second screen” idea of having tweets with a specific hashtag next to the TV during live TV events, when following the twitter backchannel during ‘The Apprentice’.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare laptop kicking around to show tweets on. But I do have a hackable TV. 🙂
With that in mind, in just a few minutes I hacked together the following script to flash up tweets with the #debill tag on the TV:
# run me using:
# python twittertv.py debill 1
import twython
import subprocess
import sys
from time import sleep
twitterKeyword = sys.argv[1]
twitterSearchRateLimitMins = int(sys.argv[2])
twitter = twython.core.setup()
showOnTVCommand = ['svdrpsend', 'mesg', 'messagetodisplay']
lasttweetid = 1
while True:
search_results = twitter.searchTwitter(twitterKeyword, since_id=lasttweetid, show_user=True)
numtweets = len(search_results["results"])
for tweetnum in reversed(range(0, numtweets)):
lasttweetid = search_results["results"][tweetnum]["id"]
user = search_results["results"][tweetnum]["from_user"]
tweet = search_results["results"][tweetnum]["text"]
showOnTVCommand[2] = user + " : " + tweet
subprocess.Popen(showOnTVCommand)
sleep(20)
sleep(twitterSearchRateLimitMins * 60)
It’s a quick-and-dirty hack, but I wanted to get something that would work before the debate was finished. 🙂
And it seems to do the trick.