The team at ProgrammableWeb threw their first Hackathon last week, and we were happy to stay late, snack on pizza and help out some great contestants. After a flurry of API talks (including ours) given by the sponsors, contestants started digging into code and hacking through the night.

When the dust settled the next afternoon, we were honored to see that Twitter was integrated into over half the entries. A few of our favorites:

• Twit Anonymous — An Android app that was billed as “Secret for Twitter”
• Allspark — Tweet or text to get an answer, like Siri for feature phones
• Twitter Insight — Mapping your social graph’s activity on Google Maps

It was hard to pick a winner for the Twitter Social Prize, but we went with EventSense, by @drewcuth1, @ackrause, @nickolaswei and @ovedpathak, all students from the Hack Reactor program.

Written in Node.js, the EventSense app helps busy event organizers run their social media campaigns by retweeting great mentions and escalating unfavorable ones. (Sentiment analysis powered by the natural language API, Wit.AI and sentiment for node.js.) More broadly, we saw potential for the technology to be used in a variety of customer support or customer experience applications.

Finally, EventSense was kind enough to share their code on Github, so that others can learn how easy it is to build on top of the Twitter platform. You can fork it here.

Thanks again to @dberlind and the great team at ProgrammableWeb for letting us sponsor this inaugural Hackathon. We look forward to joining again next year!