Today, I have finished developing a first iteration of a website called Top 100 Arabs that was build on Drupal to list the top tweeps in the MENA region, the engine heavily relies on Twitter’s and Klout’s API to fetch and update the data on an hourly basis, however, I faced so many problems dealing with Twitter API particularly because of the limited number of requests you can do to call the Twitter API even if you are oAuthed, I also tried to get myself whitelisted but it seems they stopped doing that, so I had to improvise and unleash the imaginations to workaround that, and some other complex yet simple-looking requirements.
The website is still in a beta release, and it is going to have more iterations and new functionalities.
The cotent in the website is mainly user generated, with a bunch of top tweeps we already started with which my friend Khaled collected while looking for top tweeps in MENA region. And since the website’s content is user generated, i tried my best to keep the user very comfortable with a minimal number of steps which is actually filling a simple form that includes his/her Twitter handle, and categories such as countries and profession .. etc, while the rest of data that need to be fetched is handled by the backend’s processes.
Ranking of users in the website depends mainly on Klout’s score, while each user holds a permanent rank in the list, until of course he/she decreases in Klout score, the rank will change.
The table filtration is pretty straight-forward, however, in the coming iterations, the rank will be dynamic according to filtered criteria.
The website also includes some Facebook pages that also have high number of likes and impressions in MENA, with the same usability procedure of adding content.
Charts were also used to visualize the data aside from the filter-flexible table view.
You can read more about the general idea by visiting this page
Would love to hear your comments and feedback.
