What it does

If you haven’t noticed, Twitter based apps are springing up every which way, at an incredible rate. Roomatic is just one of the latest crop. Unlike most other Twitter apps which are geared towards tracking or furthering Twitter friendships, Roomatic creates a chat room like interface on to of Twitter. Using the Twitter Search JSON API, Roomatic grabs updates associated with any one room—posts made from Roomatic are marked automatically with the room name. Hashtags can be used to differentiate rooms and to narrow down conversations. Popular rooms, displayed on the homepage include Confluence, FedoraCommons, and iPhone. To ‘chat’ using Roomatic, simply log-in using your Twitter credentials, and type in your message in the allotted space.

In their own words

“Roomatic is a experiment to create a chatroom-like user interface on top of Twitter.



It uses the Twitter Search JSON API (previously Summize) to poll for Twitter updates with the room's name in it. Posts from Roomatic are automatically marked with the room name. Room names can also be full urls (for example: http://tinyurl.com/3c9ljq).



Users can also use #hashtags to differentiate rooms and help narrow conversations (use %23 in front of the room name).”

Why it might be a killer

Roomatic adds a different dimension to Twitter. It makes it somewhat more interactive, as people can ‘converse’ through its interface. This could be useful for those who want more immediate response using Twitter.

Some questions

The functionality of this seems quite limited. Will Twitter users find it at all useful? As with most Twitter apps, this one doesn’t seem to have a business model, how’s it going to make money?

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