It is true that the best idea comes when you’re not aware of it (or anything related to it) and that’s what happened with LiveTweeting.com. Here’s the whole story: Samer Karam, a web consultant from Lebanon was looking for a way to implement the best twitter coverage for Le Web 09, he came up with the concept of live tweeting with croudsourced translations. At that time, my brother (who’s a friend of Samer) suggested me to develop it. Samer also contacted the awesome Maya Zankoul who did the design and illustrations.

So, Live Tweeting is an interactive real-time web app for multi-language live coverage of events.. Basically, some people attend the event and tweet live about it and people from all over the world translate to their languages. The service was introduced two days ago (9 December 2009) and the response blowed us away! A lot of people volunteered to help in the translation of the Le Web Coverage Test-out! The whole thing was finished in a span of a week!

On the technical side, we used Django, Twython and jQuery (+ jQuery Tools, ColorBox) The site was deployed using FastCGI (I know mod_wsgi is better, the plan is to move to it when we have time). Maroun Najm (a perl dude) saved us with a perl script to keep the thing running :)

The whole experience was awesome to me. I’ve stayed up late lots of nights before, but working on Live Tweeting was different. I was introduced to a lot of great people and had a lot of fun working while working on it.

We have big plans for Live Tweeting, we’ll try to make something out of the whole experience to develop the idea and make Live Tweeting bigger.

Finally, here’s a video that my brother did (with Maya’s illustrations) explaining Live Tweeting:

 

 

What do you think?