Hackathon produces most useful Twitter app yet – a game of 'trumps'

Who says nothing useful ever comes of a hackathon? Enter Tweet Trumps, which was coded over 24 hours by Tom Scott and Dom Hodgson at WarbleCamp, the Twitter developer ‘unconference’ held last weekend in London. It turns your mutual Twitter friends (the people you follow who follow you back) into a deck of cards ready for a game of ‘trumps’.

Each card contains a bunch of Twitter stats for a user – total number of tweets, grammar quality, followers, frequency of hastags etc. – and you’re asked to pick one of the stats to see if it ‘trumps’ the opposing card (follower) that’s about to be unveiled. It involves a fair amount of luck but also depends on how well you know your Twitter buddies — I fared terribly.

“Rather than build something ‘serious’ or ‘worthwhile’ like a social graph analyser or text-to-speech app… we built a game’, say Tom and Dom.

That’s modesty for you.

(The site seems a bit flakey right now, but that could easily be Twitter’s fault.)