Sean's blog

Twitter status search / retweet with twitter4j at movethefuckon.org

Just a quickie – I spotted a recurring comment on the web, usually shortly after someone expressed upset at some past event (I think the recent examples were outrage that Mitt Romney lost the US presidential election and / or that Obama won). Readers were apparently convinced that sufficient time had passed since the event for the original poster to get over their upset in more than one reply that said just:

movethefuckon.org

“Cool” I thought “let’s see what’s there!”, expecting to find a Web meme nugget like gt.fo or 5318008.com, but the domain wasn’t registered. So I registered movethefuckon.org, wrote a short, helpful message in a large font, and thought it didn’t really live up to the genre.

The most popular source of “movethefuckon”, according to a popular search engine, is Twitter. I wrote a little code in Java to fetch statuses from Twitter’s JSON-formatted search, extract the data with the Argo JSON library and incorporate a list of recent tweets in the page source.

I’m not sure it’s quite the right thing to do, but on the off-chance that it would encourage people to visit movethefuckon.org, I added a little extra code to retweet new #movethefuckon statuses using the MoveThe_Fuck_On Twitter account. For that I replaced Argo with the authentication, search and retweet methods from Twitter4J, which seemed to JustWork™ (except for some getURL weirdness that was easily worked around).

Enjoy, briefly – and then you know what to do.