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Become a Twitter time-traveller at ExpoTees

Student Alex Milburn has devised a new application for the global phenomenon social networking site loved by celebs - Twitter.

Computing student Alex has come up with an application to enable users to view their ‘Twitter Timeline’, a chronological list of blogs showing the user and their followers. Alex, 22, from Great Ayton, is a BSc (Hons) Business Computing student. The Twitter application is part of his final-year project, which will be on display at the University’s annual ExpoTees exhibition.

Celebrity users of Twitter range from singer Lily Allen to Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, and actor Demi Moore.

A range of undergraduate final-year and postgraduate student projects from the School of Computing will be on display at ExpoTees, and the students themselves will be available to speak to visitors and answer any questions.

This year’s ExpoTees is the fifth to be held. It will be the largest to date and takes place on Tuesday 23 March, from 1.00pm to 6.00pm in the University’s Athena Building, on the junction of Woodlands Road and Southfield Road, Middlesbrough.

The exhibition is free and open to the public, for more information: call Angela Ackerley on 01642 342653, email a.ackerley@tees.ac.uk

Alex’s project is called Albatross, a Silverlight application on Microsoft which collects Twitter blogs and plots them on a visual timeline. The blogs are represented by coloured shapes and plotted along the timeline by the date they were created. When the user clicks on the shapes, an information box is opened, showing the blog and other details about the user.

Alex said: 'I wasn’t a big Twitter user before I started this project; I was more of a Facebook fan. Quite a lot of my friends use Twitter and they think it’s a good idea. I don’t think anything like this has been tried before as Twitter is constantly changing. Albatross can be used for pleasure but also in a professional context. For example working teams can look at their messages over a time period to see what they’ve been doing, without having to scroll through previous blogs. I’d love to see this developed.

'I’m looking forward to ExpoTees. Industry professionals like developers and other students will be visiting and it’s a good opportunity to network, share ideas and hopefully lead to the start of my career.'

Other projects on display at ExpoTees include:

>a 3D environment based on the small area of a local zoo >an energy conservation project >a musical composition portraying the Azores Islands in Portugal during the Fifth Empire >a 3D library.

Gaynor Cavanagh, Senior Lecturer in Multimedia & Digital Music, said: 'ExpoTees is a fantastic forum for employers and students to come and view final year projects. It provides an opportunity to view the extremely high standard of work and talk to individual students about why and how they have produced their project.

'It also gives employers the opportunity to put ideas forward for further development or even for unique projects and discuss these ideas first-hand with students and staff.'

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