Talking Shop: An Interview With the Creators of A Feed Apart

Early on the first day of An Event Apart Boston 2009, word spread of a newly built site called A Feed Apart, bringing together all the tweets and photos that were being posted from the conference. It turned out to be the work of two attendees at the event itself, which we thought was simply awesome. After the show was over, we got in touch with the creators to talk a little shop.

Tell us a little bit about you.

Nick: I'm Nick Sergeant, and I live in sunny Rochester, NY. I'm a front-end web developer working for Dumbwaiter Design as the sole programmer / back-end developer / front-end developer / sysadmin. I started about five months ago after a brief stint in the newspaper industry building sites for 350+ publications as Senior Web Developer. I've been doing webdev stuff for about six years, with a healthy mix of experience in freelance, corporate gigs, and now a design firm position. About a year ago, Pete and I formed Lion Burger whose well-seasoned motto is “Rare web apps, well done.”

Pete: My name is Pete Karl II, and I recently moved to the Boston, MA area. I'm an engineer working for a social media marketing firm called Digital Influence Group, and I build web apps using open source technology—Python, Django, PHP, MySQL, etc. When I'm not at work, I build apps under the Lion Burger banner with Nick, who I met while working in the newspaper business. I've been developing professionally for almost five years.

What gave you the idea to do A Feed Apart?

Pete: We had just finished kicking around the city for a bit, and we found ourselves geeking out at the high levels of talent and inspiration that we were about to experience at AEA.

Nick: Pete brought up the idea that we should build something neat that might be A) useful for folks at AEA and B) something that would make a splash in the development community. We'd had relative success with Snipt, so we knew what it felt like to launch a tiny little web app in a short amount of time for a big return, and we wanted to try it again.

Pete: We were working on ReportingOn just before the conference, so the notion of backchannels for events and conversations was fresh in our heads. We were interested in the tweets/conversation going on behind-the-scenes at AEA. The recaps, the shared links, the witty references; all of them united under a variety of AEA hashtags (#aea #aea09 #aneventapart et cetera). A Feed Apart was created to be a single source of Twitter/Flickr chatter related to AEA.

How did you build A Feed Apart, and how long did it take?

Pete: We built AFA using Django, django-syncr, and the Twitter and Flickr APIs. [For more details, see Pete's article on the subject. -Ed.]

Nick: The original version of the app only took a few hours—probably around five, mostly the afternoon on the Sunday before AEA—but we spent nearly the entire conference building and tweaking the app. We didn't have session-categorized content until day two.

Pete: Those five hours on Sunday got us to a point where we could see the initial app in action, minus the ‘sessions,' which came later. We had tweets, pulled by a variety of hash tags; and we had photos, pulled in by Flickr tags. We worked on it for the duration of the conference.

Nick: The excitement that people showed about the app was the fuel that kept us going. In the beginning, it was just to be a simple little app that maybe a few folks would really enjoy and use. By the end of the first day, so many folks were using it that we were focused almost entirely on fixing the bugs, cleaning up the code, and building new features to make AFA more useful for everyone. By the end of day two, we had served 140,000 updates to AFA users. I think we almost completely stopped development on the app in the middle of the afternoon on day two. We had gotten pretty burnt out, and realized we had missed many of the great presentations we were there to see in the first place. That kinda sucked.

Were there any unexpected twists in either the development process or in the way people interacted with it once it was live?

Nick: I think there was a certain level of surprise at how quickly folks found out about and started using the app. Once Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey started tweeting about the app, the traffic just started pouring in. I was crossing my fingers waiting for the server to buckle, but Pete had thankfully previously tuned the server to a fairly fine point with Snipt—the same server runs AFA, Snipt, Finisht, and Lion Burger.

Pete: We ran into the Twitter API request rate limit frequently during development. We did a ton of tuning/tweaking to the app, and eventually realized that there was a Twitter API whitelist that we could apply for. We were approved for the whitelist during the Media Temple afterparty, so yay for day two!

Nick: I guess one unexpected twist that I realized after AEA was that we never really received much in the way of “feature requests.” With Snipt, when we first launched, we received tons and tons of feature requests. With AFA, we didn't receive much, if any. It's the type of app that just needs to simply work, and I think it does that well.

So what's next?

Pete: Once we had tweets flowing into the app, I saw some opportunities for different ways for people to interact with the site. Rather than just aggregating tweets, I'd like to see links to live blogs, posts related to sessions, and maybe some instructions on how folks can contribute more to the social media atmosphere of the conference—that is, official photo pools, maybe a del.icio.us aggregator, that kind of thing. I'd really love to give attendees the opportunity to contribute information directly to the site in the form of links, photos, or some kind of on-the-fly feedback. We're definitely going to rework it for AEA Chicago. In a larger way, Nick and I would like to see a transferable platform come out of this. Something that we can apply to any conference. The response this has gotten indicates some potential.

Nick: In addition to working on the next generation A Feed Apart platform and hacking on Snipt, we're attempting to build a design and development community around the “Refreshing Cities” manifesto in Rochester, NY. We're setting up shop at http://refreshrochester.com and @refreshroc, and hope to be hosting the first meeting shortly.

Sounds awesome! Thanks to you both for your time and for making AEA Boston even better with your work.

Pete: Thanks for talking with us. I'm glad we could add something to the AEA experience.

Nick: Thanks for the opportunity. Looking forward to future AEAs!