Having your favorite TV shows spoiled by your Twitter feed could soon become a thing of the past thanks to a 17-year-old girl.
Jennie Lamere wrote a plug-in for the social networking software called Twivo that allows users to censor their feed about certain shows and characters for a set period of time.
Lamere wrote the code as part of a Boston hackathon hosted by TVNext. According to Mother Jones, Lamere wrote the code alone in about ten hours. It’s reported she hatched the idea the night before the competition began and was able to achieve the results she wanted with just 150 lines of code. Twivo works as an extension in your browser. You simply type in the words or phrased you want blocked and they are deleted from your feed until a set time or you turn off the block because you’ve seen the show in question.
She won in the subcategory “best use of sync-to-broadcast” and then won “best in show,” beating out professional developers, including ESPN, the Echo Next and Klout, sent by the event’s sponsors.
Lamere says the code is still in demo mode and that she needs a couple more weeks to finalize it before she releases the plug-in. As part of her winning the competition, she’s attracted the attention of tech company Furious Minds who is working with her on finalizing the plug-in and its marketing.
“We’re always interested in the convergence between TV and social media, and Jen’s hack was awesome, not to mention she did the entire thing herself,” says Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Minds.
Lamere was the only female to enter the competition. After winning, she returned to her all-girls’ high school where she hopes to inspire other female coders to enter future competitions.
May we suggest that for her next project, Lamere extend the plug-in for also block SPOILER-filled feeds on Facebook as well?
I like it. Better than mute feature on some 3rd party twitter clients.