It went down like this. Jon and Tricia and I were working one day and we started brainstorming ideas about games we’d like to develop. We had an itch to scratch about creating something for Twitter at the same time. Naturally, where the two worlds collided, the byproduct was inspired. That was a year ago. The idea we came up with was this:

A or B

@aorb is a twitter handle we set up where people can send in questions like Chocolate or Vanilla? Donuts or Petit Fours? Vigorous health or profound wisdom? Six of one or half dozen of the other? (That one’s from as far back as last May.) Forget for a moment why anyone would want to ask or answer one of these absurd questions. It’s a game. It’s just another trivial something that says a little bit about who you are and what makes you tick. We wanted to simply create a place where people could tune in to receive these absurd questions and then reply with their answers. All in good fun.

We abandoned it a year ago though because we realized that there was a lot of work in creating a system that would actually do anything with those responses. Which is to say, we imagined a hundred of our closest friends actually replying to our absurd aorb’s. What then? How do we count the winner? How do we handle responses that include both or neither? How do we track how that original tweet propagated throughout the twittersphere?

It turns out that Gina Trapani had the same dilemma not too long ago. And she built a product that did some of that analytics work on tweets. She called it twitalytic. Not it’s called ThinkTank and it’s a sponsored open source project that will be used by the White House to crowdsource greater social innovation. It’s a far cry from our absurd little game, but when it comes down to it, ThinkTank is exactly the kind of app we would have built to analyze our aorb’s.

The ThinkTank app and our aorb game are both in their infancy, but we’re going to grow together. Given that it’s an open source project with greater good attached to it, we’re happy to participate as both developers and promoters of the app. Watch this space for more updates.

Below is a sample output from our most recent @aorb tweet “Bland beauty or interesting ugliness?” It’s updated dynamically from the ThinkTank app installed on our server and integrated with our wordpress install. It’s a humble beginning.

[thinktank_status_replies status_id="9242886703" show_message=1]

If you want to play along, please start following @aorb on twitter and replying to our tweets from there. We send out just one a day. And all the results will be displayed on our @aorb ThinkTank.