I’m building a web app that many people will be using at the same time. I have a requirement that whenever one user has a significant event (like winning a game), information about it is sent to all of the other users. Not for them to do anything about it, just to allow them to see a running list of cool stuff that’s happening. I imagine that these significant events will happen at a rate of about twice a minute for the entire system.
I was thinking about all of the server resources and code that would be needed to support this, and then I suddenly thought I could simply do this with Twitter. Every time a significant event happened our server could send out a tweet about it, and each page of the web app could include a little javascript widget that displayed all of these tweets. As an added bonus, people who just wanted to follow what was going on with the app could do so with a simple Twitter client.
Before I go too deeply into this, I wanted to hear some feedback on whether you think this is a good idea or not. What sorts of things should I be looking at to do this right?
Why not use an RSS feed instead?
Non-proprietary, unlimited, fully controlled by you, potential for more than 140chars, probably easier to code and almost definitely easier to maintain as the API won’t change when you least expect it.