The more friends you refer, the more special your trophy.  They have to use the link provided in the mailto link, on the main game page, so that the system knows who referred them.  And they have to activate their account and play 1 days worth of words.

All the cool kids have trophies.

Thanks for helping me test out the game.  Round 1 is now over and the winners are:

1st:  Pgerzani
2nd:  Jillian
3rd:  ThePet

I wrote the beginnings of a trophies system tonight and gave everyone who helped me this first round a trophy for it.  Working on finding trophies for 1st 2nd and 3rd place round winners, plus some other secret ones that you won’t know of until someone figures out just how to get them.

Round 2 starts Sunday, so all scores are back down to 0.  If you are new and are not sure what’s going on, here’s a quick run down:

Twitter is a sort of instant-messaging system that is widely used throughout the world.  Most people have their twitter accounts set up as public, so everything they tweet goes to the twitter public timeline:  http://twitter.com/public_timeline

I pull everything that goes to the public timeline and break it up word by word.

The goal of this game is to enter 5 unique words every day of the week.  5 words that you think will score high in points.  The more popular the word is in the twitter public timeline, the more points you will get.

Round 2 will be a nouns only round.  I’m not sure how well my dictionary of nouns is, I guess we’ll see.

Also, watch out for “Bonus word” days.  On valentines day there were a few valentines day related words that scored big bonuses.

So remember to lock in 5 unique words before 11:00 PM EST every day.  And please invite friends!

-Ryan

http://www.tweetwords.com

Follow http://twitter.com/tweetwords to get notified of news, round results and other things TweetWords related.

I got the authentication/session/userdata system linked well enough with phpbb for now.  So that means we can use the forums.  There’s a set topic for each round.  A forum for general chat.  And… well… what other forums do we need?

I’m just writing this post to test the news feed on the game’s index page.

These are not the droids you’re looking for.

A couple nights of playing with the twitter public timeline followed by one night of drunk-coding and *poof* I had some sort of game. I think it’s coming along alright though. Some things that are implemented:

• A normal base set of rules.
  • Points are based on scrabble score of each word + (popularity of word / 100)
  • 5 words per day
  • Can’t re-use words
• An actual design is starting to be rolled out. Not the greatest, but hey, better than my first drunken design that involved text (not html, text) followed by br’s.
• New set of rules. I parsed a huge part of speech list and put it in the db. With that I now have a “isNoun” function. We’ll be using these new rules starting 2/17. Only nouns allowed. Scoring is scrabble based word score + full popularity of word.  So a word was used 100 times, you’d get scrabble score + 100.
• And now I have a news section

Some things being worked on:

• Integrating the user authentication in to phpbb install. This will allow an integrated forum for chatting about the current round and hopefully a community will pop up in it.
• Better plugin design for word validation and scoring. (homewrecker and pgerzani are helping out there!)
• Fixing up the design/fixing bugs/fixing remaining code written while drunk

Some things planned on, but not started yet:

• SMS/email alerts for various events
  • Haven’t entered new words past X hour
  • Scores calculated
• Further plugins for mixing up the scoring
• Considering TweetWords.com for the name.
• Admin section for setting up rounds, banning cheaters, etc.

Please give feedback. Be honest. I think with enough help and enough feedback that something fun could be created out of this.