IIRC the friends list is in the default app permissions, and calling the graph API only returns the friends on your list who also gave the same permission to the app.
Everyone sharing everything they have downloaded in a giant cache via mesh networking? Yip, its a great solution. One person endures a slow download, all those who follow have a grand speedy old time.
At present wispy ignores all 3 letter words, apart from a small list considered "non boring", it also ignores plenty of longer words that are considered generally meaningless, The hashtag idea is good, ill look into that, consider it on my todo list :)
Click detection is something I have been thinking about, its not as hard as you think as the general coordinates of each word are stored when building the cloud in the first place.
It uses jsonp to talk to the twitter api, so if its a rate limit, its on your own ip, are you in a large company or uni by any chance? Otherwise it might just be a slow connection, you dont really know when a jsonp call has failed, so you just have to time it out after a while and assume thats what happened, happens to me every now and again when using it from a phone. If its none of the above, please send me a message using the sites contact form, it tells me a lot about your browser in the process and I can try and replicate the problem.
I'm planning on doing that, and open sourcing quite a bit of the tools/libraries I had to build myself. The contact page is a little fancy in that it sniffs your browsers feature set via javascript and sends it on to me when you send a message, a huge help with tech support :) Its up on github and linked to on the faq page.
Thanks, that's pretty much why I built it, its still not as nice as wordle though, but I had to make a lot of feature/performance trade-offs to get it running at a decent speed.
HTML5 Canvas powered, with a flash fall-back so it even supports ie6 (very slow on it though). Supports Twitter, Facebook, and pasting in anything you like.
