Can you use Twitter, or at least the content within various tweets, to make a delicious fruit smoothie? If you can manipulate Twitter’s API to target mentions of various fruits and other smoothie ingredients, you absolutely can. Thanks to the efforts of the Tasty Tweets collective, you can now see such innovation in action.
Before that, however, a description from the group of how their creation works:
Using the Twitter API, it collects tweets containing mentions of specific fruits such as blueberry, pineapple, apple and carrot and creates a smoothie that represents the blend. The smoothie is created based on the same proportions of fruits collected from the tweets. Because twitter trends change quickly, each smoothie has a unique palette of flavors.
Pretty ingenious, no? Not only that, but think about the other applications. Considering how many people share every little detail of their life on Twitter, if you expanded the API to include other food items beyond fruit, you feasibly create a menu with a great deal of variety.
Or the biggest bacon-riddled concoction the world’s ever seen.
As for the tweet-based smoothies, there are further applications, such as trend monitoring, you may not have expected from such creative API use:
Data from which the smoothie is created are graphically represented on a computer screen. It shows the proportions of flavors in the current smoothie as well as the most recent tweets from which the smoothie was created. Furthermore, a historic view of past smoothies allows users to compare trends over time.
To add another dimension to the visualization, Tasty Tweets is constructed in a way that makes it possible to layer the different juices within the glass. The layering of the juices results in a visual representation of the proportions of flavors in the smoothie – a graph in a glass.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see a company like Dole or Del Monte using the Twitter API to track the kinds of fruits people are talking about, but not for the purpose of making smoothies. Instead, this valuable consumer data could be used to tailor various “Sponsored Tweets” campaigns based on the kinds of fruit people are tweeting about.
The Tasty Tweets crew also has a video of their efforts in action, although, it feels a little incomplete:
