Twitivia

Twitter, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, XNA, iPhone, what do they all have in common? Twitivia! (If you’re on twitter feel free to follow the project @twitivia on twitter).

Twitivia is a project that you can follow me through, it is a simple idea, ask one trivia question a day on twitter and track the answers.

The goal is to create an application that will do all the real work and then spread the client to as many platforms as possible (web, iPhone, Xbox, desktop (WPF)) and you can follow me through. As I build the application, I am going to post the progress (bad code and all) and hopefully some can learn with me, and others will point me in the right direction when I’m lost.

So, let’s get started shall we?

Step one: Get twitter all set up

Well that was simple, go to twitter.com and click the join button.

I setup the new account to be twitivia (obviously) and then went out and registered the domain (yes, I really did). So when we start writing code that runs on the net, like the leader board (for scores) and all the various service end points, we can all find it.

I found a nice icon, changed the design colors on the twitter site and bang, it was online.

Step two: Let people know

I posted the first question and winning answer (hmm could use that as a trivia question later on.. who was the first winner on twitivia).

Then I went out to my regular twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/kuronoir (feel free to follow me there too)) and posted the “it’s alive” announcement and since my twitter and Facebook accounts are linked, about 150-200 people were notified.

I got some good feedback and have asked people to email me questions and answers we can use to populate the database. If you have some good trivia, email me.

Step three: Let’s work out the application plan

Since the primary input and output channel is twitter, I think the first place to go would be to the twitter API and start fooling around with that.