Iron Monkey Ventures

I was traveling quite a bit for work, and there was no easy way to check my flight status.  The blackberry browser does not work with most airline and flight info service websites.
The last thing I need to do is sign up for more alerts and services.

So I wrote this twitter bot that will reply with my flight status.
It’s fast, free, and simple.

1.  Follow @myflightinfo and wait for a follow back.
2.  Send your flight information in a message.  Like this “d myflightinfo co101″.
3.  Within a minute, you should get a direct message back with your status.

The data comes from Flightstats.com

After completing MapMyTweeps, I started looking into next “degree” of mapping my network (friends of friends, friends’ followers etc) to look for any interesting information.

Here is my first rendering of my Twitter network.  It maps my first 100 followers, for each of my followers it maps 3 of their followers, and then one more iteration.  The size and complexity grow too quickly for me to get any useful information.  Plus it takes forever.

I think I’m going about this the wrong way.  I need a question or a hypothesis and then see if I can answer using social network mapping.

I halved the average load time by using multi curl to pull data.  10 seconds for the first time user instead of over 20.
I’m satisfied for today.