twtspire.com| idea for the next startup = One Tweet Away?

Startups solve problems.

So if you find a problem there’s probably a startup idea lying somewhere nearby.

A Montreal developer Kenji Wellman developed an app called twtspire.com that scours twitter and automatically detects tweets from people that wonder why a solution doesn’t exist for a specific problem they’re having.

Here are example of tweets from twtspire.com that could result in some kind apps

Why isn’t there an app that auto-deletes texts you send after 4am. #facepalm

Oh my god. Someone needs to make an app that makes an instrumental out of any song. #IsThatLegal #KaraokeAllDayEveryDay

There’s also evil ideas like:

Wish there was a single website with complete book/movie summaries with spoilers.

Twitter has over 50 million daily tweets, so testing and refining the app was done in a single week-end. The app uses a combination of keywords as well as keyword exclusion rules (which eliminate unwanted terms) and keyword proximity rules. For all of the meaty details and source code headover to Kenji’s blog