I’m really loving the whole notion around Micro-Apps. There’s something about the idea of sitting down for a short period of time and just launching something that really gets me excited.

Some define characteristics of a Micro-App as the following:

• Built in one (or two) sittings.
• Very narrow focus. Few features. Solves one or two things.
• Just get something launched.

For me, it gives me a renewed hope that it is possible to get things launched. It’s just a great feeling and inspires the other larger projects I am working on.

There are certainly no shortage of people building micro-apps. A couple of friends here in Victoria have created some very successful apps and seem to always be pushing out things on a regular basis. Very inspiring.

I also went to Eric Kastner’s talk about Micro-Apps at RailsConf recently and got inspired to build my own.

Are you being heard? Or ovrheard?

This weekend I put together a little app that scans the Twitter public timeline for anything pre-pended with abbreviation “OH:” which of course is short for “Overheard”. People use this when they quote something funny that another person has said and is especially funny when taken out of context.

The app took me a few hours to build on the weekend and is available at Ovrheard.us. It doesn’t look pretty (yet) but it is launched and collecting people’s funny quotes.

It is based on an application I built about 9 years ago that displays a random quote that somebody has entered. We’ve got over 100,000 entries over there which is pretty neat since it was built in a few hours as well and just kept the domain name active all these years. The plan is to re-do this app as well.