(Guest Post by Todd Khozein:)

I am proud to say that I have written my first, yes my first, web app ever in the form of a tool to proliferate the growing and widespread impulsive want-it-NOW shopper’s need to be the first to know in the form of a Twitter Bot that will, indeed, tell you what the latest DVD releases are with a link to buy it NOW! Thanks to Joshua for holding my tender little virgin hacker’s hand through the intricacies of building something that actually works in a world where run-on sentences are acceptable, nay encouraged.

I think I have officially taken a significant step towards geekdom and feel that I should commemorate this occasion of the alpha release by inviting you, the reader, to make this app wildly successful and dedicating the remainder of your waking hours tonight and possibly tomorrow in telling all of your people how sexy this app really is.

It doesn’t matter how good you are, or how many hours you work – if you don’t bill for it, you ain’t gonna get paid. Now I’ve put together a little tool that will allow you to keep track of how you’re spending your time (and BILL for it, if that’s your thing) – no matter where you are, or what you’re doing. 

It’s a Twitter app, you see. So you can talk to it from:

• A webpage
• An instant-messaging client, or
• Your phone (via text-messaging)

You don’t even have to set up an account first – just follow http://twitter.com/timetrack, wait a minute or two for the bot to start following you back, and then send simple messages like this:

d timetrack start washingfloors
d timetrack stop washingfloors

If you match up the start and stop commands, the bot will total up the time for you. (Don’t worry, we’ll give you the exact times of every action regardless, so you can clean things up later if you forget something.)

Now, here’s my question for you – what sort of reports and exports would you like to see? Here are a few I’m considering:

• SalesForce.com export
• Blinksale (Invoicing) data
• CSV / Excel spreadsheet data
• XML / JSON
• Quickbooks payroll data

What have I missed?

If you get a strange, visceral pleasure in wasting hours, even days, of your life, waiting for your local WalMart to get more Beanie Babies in stock – then you should stop reading right now.

If you like to revisit your local grocery store every night, just to see if they’ve dropped the price on those great donuts in aisle 4… then hit the Back Button, and read something else.

But – if you have a life, and you still want to try and buy something online – I might have something that can help.

It’s called BuyLater, and that’s exactly what it’s for – buying Amazon products, later on.

Later can be: When it’s back “In Stock” (can someone say Wii?), or simply when it’s a little cheaper (or even on sale).

Unlike many of my ideas (which are unique, innovative, and incomprehensible), this one actually isn’t mine. My buddy Jesse Andrews did it first, with a Wii-only bot called WiiMe. I just took the idea, and strreeettched it a little.