SpendOnLife Launches Twinancial to Aggregate All Personal Finance Tweets

It seems like everyone is Twittering these days and we at SpendOnLife are no different. In fact, we encourage you to give us a follow @SpendOnLife and join in on the conversation.

If you’re like us, you sometimes find Twitter a little overwhelming. So many people are talking about credit and personal finance (the topics that we at hold closest to our hearts here at SpendOnLife). But it’s not just the authorities within the community that are having these discussions. It’s everyone. 

The amazing thing about Twitter is you can use it for so many things, including helping those that have personal finance on their minds but may not know where to look for answers. The problem is, how do you find and connect with those people?

The answer for us was to build an internal tool called Twinancial (Get it? Twitter + Financial = Twinancial?) We knew we wanted to do three things:

#1: Assist people who had personal finance questions and concerns.

#2: Find like-minded tweeps.

#3: Connect with the community as a whole.

After using this tool internally for a period of time it became apparent that others might find it useful. So with that said, we have decided to release Twinancial as a public beta. Our hope is that the community will benefit from this and we can make substantial improvements to the current tool. Twinancial is and always will be free to use and requires no membership signup.

So what exactly is Twinancial you ask?
 

Tweet Stream

The tweet stream you see on each page is a current listing of tweets organized by category and terms. Twinancial monitors Twitter for individual words and phrases and then categorizes each of them. You can select a category to browse from the right hand navigation or you can select an individual term from the term cloud. This way you can monitor a specific term or a whole category without having to follow everyone on Twitter and sift through hundreds of thousands of tweets.

RSS Feeds

If you have certain terms or categories that you want to follow on a regular basis the RSS feeds are a lifesaver. Each category and term has its own feed which you can subscribe to. The subscription links are located in the top right navigation bar of each individual category or term page. This should help you to more easily integrate Twitter into your daily reading.

Top Users & Links

The Top User section is based on the volume of relevant tweets that a user makes. The Top Links is based on the number of times those links are used in the tweets we aggregate.

So there you have it. As we mentioned, this is definitely a beta so please let us know if you find any bugs. Also, what you would like to see changed to make the tool more useful to you? Are there features you want to see? Terms you want monitored? And don’t forget to let us know how you are using the tool. There are probably plenty of uses for it that we haven’t thought of yet. You can leave your feedback below or email

Lastly, we are considering releasing the code as open source so that other people and communities can take advantage. If you would be willing to contribute to such an open source tool, let us know. The more interest we have, the more likely it is to happen.