twitterdb - Using twitter as a database

I just had this crazy idea. If you already read the title, then you already know! ;-)

Twitter is crazy cool. You can tweet as much as you want (I think) and can create gigabytes of useless personal trivia… or you can store somthing kinda cool in it… DATA! As a result, you can get a free Small-Document-Oriented database you can access from the cloud.

Sure, this is nuts, but its fun to consider, right?

First, each “table” is a twitter “account”, call it “app.table” or whatever. Each “tweet” to the table is a record. Ok, twitter posts can only be 140 characters—a limit I otherwise appreciate. We can store the record as any parsable key/value store.

Perhaps we could use JSON:{“ircEvent”: “PRIVMSG”, “method”: “newURI”, “regex”: “^http://.*”}

Or a Ruby Hash: {:key=>”value”, …}

Or Python Dictionary: {‘jack’: 4098, ‘sape’: 4139}

Insert the data by tweeting the record to the table. Now you are storing it. You can’t update it, only supercede a record.  How would we access it? Feeds, api, searches, and mashups.My twitter-fu on this isn’t so strong as I never had a need for it before.

But still… could be interesting, right? And you could even SHARE data by posting it to public databases like this. For sanity, you would validate and post this through a gateway service of your own devising.

I wonder now much this could be like CouchdB, SimpleDB, or the Google App Engine Datastore this is?

Perhaps this could be work exploring. Maybe I could even write ActiveRecord (Ruby on Rails) bindings to emulate this. Someday.

I’ll keep you posted…