For all of you, myself included, who often have to avoid Twitter on nights when your favorite TV shows are airing and you can’t watch them live as they air for fear of having them spoiled by the people you follow, well, a 17 year-old girl may have just changed your life.
Yes, last month Jennie Lamere invented Twivo, a program that allows Twitter users to censor tweets containing mentions of TV show names and/or the names of characters from those shows. Lamere presented Twivo at a national coding competition — the TVnext Hack event in Boston that was held on April 27 — and she beat out roughly 80 other competitors, all of whom were male, to win the grand prize.
Lamere took her sub-category, “best use of sync-to-broadcast” and then the overall “best in show”, which earned her swag including iPad minis and an Apple TV. She beat out professional developers sent by the event’s sponsors, including ESPN, the Echo Nest, and Klout. She came up with the idea for Twivo the night before the competition, and it took her 10 hours and 150 lines of code to complete. It works as an extension to the Google Chrome browser: A user can type in the key words she would like to block, and for how long, and make those Tweets disappear. In the screenshot below, Twivo has blocked out Twitter references to one of Lamere’s favorite TV shows, Lifetime’s “Dance Moms” (the Twitter accounts that are more prominent, like the official “Dance Moms” account, automatically appear larger.) Once a user is done blocking the show, the Tweets reappear. Lamere says the program is still in demo form and won’t be ready for another two or three weeks, but she’s already been approached by Furious Minds, a tech company that intends to help her market the final product.
Here’s the screenshot mentioned in the excerpt above which demonstrates how Twivo works…
We here at UPROXX salute you, Jennie Lamere, and we look forward to not having Mad Men and Game of Thrones spoiled for us by our Twitter friends in the future thanks to the program you invented.
(Pic via Jennie Lamere’s Twitter page)