Spend the weekend of October 18th and 19th with us, designing, developing, and deploying the micro application you’ve been dreaming about.

So, eat burritos and code for an entire weekend. One of these days, I’ll be able to pull something like that off.

This year, Providence Geeks rock stars Matt Gillooly (@mattgillooly), Alex Taylor (@goldenmeanie), TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) and Steve Babigian (@k00k) formed a team. And they came up with something awesome.

Twalala is a web-based Twitter client (I just happen to be running it as a site-specific browser using Fluid.app in the screenshot above). Why does the world need another Twitter client? Because this one solves a problem that nobody else does.

Twalala is “Twitter with a mute button”. Why would you want to mute something in Twitter? Here are a few examples I can come up with:

• You don’t want to hear anything about a specific movie/tv show until you’ve seen it. You can add “Iron Man” or “LOST” to your mute phrases and nothing containing those words will show up in your stream.
• You’re like me and hate automated messages that come from other services. Find the text that is always in those (like “Welcome new followers:”) and cut them from your stream.
• Maybe you feel obligated to follow that reeeeeeally annoying person that’s new to Twitter. Well, you can, then mute them, and they’ll be none the wiser. Until they ask you what you thought of that tweet…

Here’s where you set your muting preferences:

“No Thanks” includes phrases you want cut from your stream. “I Didn’t Mean You!” is a whitelist. You can add phrases or usernames that will be allowed through, even if other parts of the message are muted per the filters above it. Finally, “Take a Timeout” mutes everything by a specific user.

When something is white-listed through the “I Didn’t Mean You!” portion, it is highlighted in your stream (see my “twalala” tweet from the first screenshot). Very cool for your ego, when you can easily see if someone mentions you or your company.

After just two days of development, Twalala is surprisingly robust. Every time I accessed it over the weekend, something was new, tweaked, or fixed. Of course, there are still a few things missing to make me completely ditch Hahlo, but I’m sure they’re coming. Those things are:

• A replies view
• The ability to view DMs sent and received
• A favorite button next to each Tweet
• Hyperlinked hashtags (even if it just sent me off to the search.twitter interface, though integrated would be cool)

I love where this is headed, though. It even looks great on iPhone after a double-tap (one of my requirements for a Twitter client is consistent user experience on iPhone and in-browser).

Great job, guys!

Please, give Twalala a try.