I wish there was an app for...

I’ve always collected ideas for new services in my notes. I have some good ideas, and lots of terrible ideas. But I've found that the ones I build are usually the ones that catch me at the right time. When I have just enough time to think and start tinkering. This was an idea (about ideas) that I built in a matter of hours: iwishtherewas.app

It's a simple Lambda function that is cronned every few minutes, using the Twitter API to search for:

"wish there was an app" -is:retweet OR "I need an app that" -is:retweet OR "Is there an app that" -is:retweet OR "I wish there was a service that" -is:retweet OR "I want an app" -is:retweet OR "Can someone make an app" -is:retweet

You can type this in the Twitter search box and see the results for yourself.

The results are written to a JSON file on a public S3 bucket and the website loads this file directly in the browser. No database, no search or categorisation. It was just a fun little project that spawned a great discussion on Hacker News

Update 08 June 2023

This project has ended due to recent Twitter API changes that would cost me $5000/mo. Thanks Elon! I'm letting the domain name expire and have updated the link in this article to a static snapshot.