For my 10% time project I have decided to look at whether Friends and Family Ratings could be submitted via Twitter.
The idea was that if you’re sat in a GP waiting room you might be tweeting, and if you were shown a particular hashtag(s) then you could use these to tweet a view on the service you’re receiving.
This example could be flawed in several ways, as you’re more likely to want to give an opinion after you’ve actually seen the doctor, not while you’re waiting there…
However I’m going to explore the possibilities and see where it takes us – there may be mileage in integrating with Care Connect so that people can submit real-time ratings, comments or complaints via Twitter. It could be extended beyond Twitter itself to other channels. We could make use of geo-location (thanks Russell) or QR codes (thanks Sean) to enhance the experience.
EDIT – there seems to be appetite for this today
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24669382
The technical bit
So far I have a basic Gherkin spec which looks like this –
Feature: Grab Tweets By Hashtag
In order to store tweets for processing
Twit can grab tweets with a specified hashtag from twitter
Scenario: Grab a new tweet with a hashtag
Given there is a new tweet with the hashtag #nhsfft
When you wait 15 seconds
And you run Twit
Then this tweet should be stored
In the background this automatically posts a tweet from a personal dev account I set up, and then runs a console app (called Twit, right now) which searches twitter for tweets with this hashtag and then stores the tweets in a RavenDB store for future processing. The 15 second pause is there as the tweet wasn’t showing up in search results immediately – this sucks a bit as it slows down the automated test…
The next step is to write a separate process, which takes these stored tweets and posts them to Choices via our comment capture API.
I’m trying to practice what I preach (!) and use a BDD and TDD approach to the coding, with lots of refactoring as I go to ensure the code-base stays simple and clean.
It’s also good for learning – I found that you don’t have to store the NuGet packages in source control (thanks Steve), and am learning bits and pieces about RavenDB too.
Interacting with Twitter poses some challenges too. I began writing raw requests, but found dealing with OAuth was eating up time (when I just want to get something working) so am now using a couple of .Net components that wrap around the Twitter API. It’s likely that I’ll have to move from using the REST API to the Streaming API too, in order to ensure we don’t miss any tweets.
I’m also learning more about git – it’s only in a local repository at present, but will hopefully be in github soon!
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