140 character theatre reviews – a Twitter experiment

At #DandDuk the other night (of which a write up will happen soon), someone mentioned how they tweet a review as they get out of the theatre and sometimes during the interval. It’s something that I’ve heard or seen other people do, from bloggers to professional critics, and I think it’s a neat little way to review a show, especially in today’s ADD society.

From this I had an idea. Create a Twitter account that auto-tweets 140 character reviews from theatre bods if they hashtag them. The tweet wouldn’t be a standard RT, but the initial review with an attribution to the author at the end of the tweet. It would act as an aggregation of theatre reviews that anyone could look at for a quick snapshot of what others thought.

After tinkering around for about 15 minutes, I had something working. However, I wanted to make sure that the account only tweeted out reviews from trusted people to stop the channel being abused. I also didn’t want to have to moderate it, as I wanted it to be completely automated.

The result was @140thtr.

The premise is that a list of bloggers (who can be found here) can tweet their review with the hashtag #140thtr, and it will appear in the @140thtr feed within half an hour (cycles on Twitter are a bit problematic).

I was astounded by how easy it was to set up with a mixture of php, Yahoo! pipes and a handy service like TwitterFeed. However, at the moment the names of the reviewers are manually entered. What I aim to do in the future is to tie it into the above list, so as soon as someone is on the list, they are automatically approved. I’ve figured out how to do it, but the results are a little ugly at the moment, so I’ll play around with it and see.

If you want to be added to the 140thtr list, then let me know on Twitter or comment here.