Warning: This post about very NSFW language contains mildly NSFW language
Two years before CBS and William Shatner sanitized Twitter’s hilarious “Shit My Dad Says” into a less well received “$#*! My Dad Says,” Richard Henry’s Cursebird was unapologetically entertaining those who find coarse language an underappreciated art form.
Launched in October 2008, Cursebird has provided a never-ending scroll of tweets that share nothing in common except for the fact that they include one or more – some a lot more — of the words you can’t say on TV. Charts aggregate how often the words are used by the Twitter crowd and track trends.
Now, thanks to site upgrades unveiled last week, Cursebird has begun awarding points for bad behavior and featuring a leader board for those select few who see swearing as a competitive sport of sorts.
Want to know how often you’ve sworn, just enter your Twitter name and up pops your tally, the “level” your swearing frequency has attained, and a witty little description of your activity.
Cursebird tells me that I swear “like a BBC news presenter,” presumably because out of the 3,705 tweets I have sent, only two have contained a naughty word (two “bastards;” one lucky, one poor). That puts me on Level 2; the leader is on Level 82.
“You earn XP depending on the quality of your profane tweet, meaning the swear words you choose, and whether or not it’s in the context of a real sentence,” Henry tells me via e-mail. “The more XP you have, the further up the leader board you belong.”
There are bots among the leaders, which detracts a bit from the fun, but that’s a quibble.
Henry, a twentysomething Web application developer, says Cursebird is “currently storing around 60 million tweets, 5 million user profiles, and well over 300 million individual objects for various bits of information. And it can all be searched very quickly.”
And how’s the site been doing?
“If anything, Cursebird is more popular now than it ever has been,” he says. “Over the past year it’s been tweeted about more than 10,000 times, and we receive around 5,000 page views every day. “
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