Today, Rochester Institute of Technology hosted the annual Imagine RIT Festival. Literally thousands of people came to the RIT campus to see the best of what students had to offer. While there were many exhibits that were beyond awesome, I feel as if I should be a good team member and mention the project that team IV has worked on for almost 20 weeks.
Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival is a campus-wide event that showcases the innovative and creative spirit of RIT students, faculty and staff. Visitors experience the breadth and depth of RIT through interactive presentations, hands-on demonstrations, exhibitions, and research projects set up throughout campus. Inflatables, games and multiple performance stages with live music and entertainment are also a hit with visitors of all ages. Held annually each spring, Imagine RIT is the annual kickoff to Rochester’s rich festival season.
Team IV consists of eight (soon to be graduating) students, four from New Media Design, three from New Media Interactive Development, and one from Multidisciplinary Studies. For two quarters (just over 20 weeks) we have been working on our project.
Newsiversse is an interactive feed reader application that ties into the Twitter API. Currently it takes the most popular content from five sites and displays them as well as Twitter Tweets that (usually) are directly related to the issue that you are reading about. The site went live today for the Imagine RIT festival. (check it out!)
What Is Twitter?
Twitter is a free social networking tool that allows users to post Tweets. Tweets are text-based posts that can be up to 140 characters. Twitter users can link to their friends’ accounts and see when they post new tweets.
What are Feeds and Feed Readers?
Web Feeds provide users of a site with data which is frequently updated. For example, if someone were to look at a web feed for CNN, they could view the most recent articles. Feed readers are tools that look at the data within the feed and present it in an easy to read way.
Why are we so awesome?
Newsiversse not only shows information from feeds but the Twitter tweets that go along with them. For example, if CNN posted an article about President Obama meeting the Queen of England, Newsiversse would show you the article as well as what Twitter users are saying about it. By using Twitter, we can see not only is big in the news but how people are reacting to the news.
