All Climbing

As Twitter hits the mainstream, climbers are increasingly using the service to communicate and share. A few months ago, the Rock Climber Girl took the initiative to setup a wiki to keep a list of the growing number of climbers on Twitter.

Unfortunately, manually maintaining a wiki was going to be too much work as Twitter’s growth continues. So I decided to take the idea a step further and create ThinkClimbing.

ThinkClimbing is both a directory of climbers (and everything climbing-related) on Twitter and well as a real-time stream of all the climbing related tweets.

Current Features

• Search for people tweeting about climbing near you. Just enter your location in the search box.
• Weather forecasts. If you use a postal code for your location, the current weather forecast for your area will be displayed above the nearby climbing tweets.
• Directory of climbers and everything climbing related including retailers, manufacturers, media, blogs, sites, gyms, organizations, guides, and climbing schools. If you’re not already in the directory, please get yourself registered by signing up.
• Quickly retweet, view tweets, reply, or direct message from any climbing tweet.

Planned Features

• Search for users by name or location.
• RSS feeds to alert you when new users are added.
• Clean up the design and make everything a bit more shiny and polished.
• Ability to find climbers based on your specific climbing interests and abilities.

Registering on ThinkClimbing

You may wonder why you should bother registering on ThinkClimbing. Here’s are the big reasons:

• Add yourself to the directory of climbers on Twitter. ThinkClimbing doesn’t ask for your Twitter password, just for your username. No worries of us ever spamming or hijacking your account!
• New features are planned that will be using the profile you create on ThinkClimbing. In the future, you’ll be able to add information about your climbing interests and abilities that will help you connect with other climbers.

How does it work?

Using Twitter’s APIs, we pull in any mention of climbing, bouldering, or mountaineering along with a few of the major climbing-related hashtags being used. In addition, our search algorithm tries to remove unrelated discussions.

The image below show how to use the #climb hashtag:

Please let me know your thoughts on the development of ThinkClimbing. There’s a feedback tab on the site, you can leave a comment below, or let us know using the feedback form.

• Tags: thinkclimbing, twitter, website