VE VeloTweets

VeloTweets, “the Pulse of the Peloton,” collected the Twitter posts of professional road cyclists in one place. In early 2009 I had started following riders such as Lance Armstrong through their RSS feeds and noticed that, read together, they gave a first-person view of the peloton during races. VeloTweets included only pro riders and a few others in the sport, added each rider’s team and nationality, and showed each rider once in a grid with their most recent message, so frequent posters did not crowd out everyone else. It also gathered TwitPic photos as VeloPics, kept a race calendar, and ran a Message of the Day tied to the day’s racing.

It was a side project with no budget and no business behind it. The idea was mine. Luke Francl did most of the development, in Rails 2.3; Norm Orstad designed the site; Chris Hatch built the list of riders and filled in their profiles; and I “played sweeper,” helping wherever I could. The grid came out of a working session: I credit Norm’s comparison to a baseball card, and Luke credits me with showing one tweet per rider. Luke announced the site on Rail Spikes on May 10, 2009, and I followed two days later with Introducing VeloTweets and Why do Cyclists Tweet?.

The last Internet Archive capture of the working site is from March 2010; by February 2011 velotweets.com was a parked domain. In 2014 I listed @VeloTweets among the Twitter accounts I had deleted (Twitter Spam #NFL).