How do you integrate Twitter and your WordPress Blog the best way. In this post we have listed a few things you can do easily to leverage the strength of Twitter on your WordPress Blog.

Twitter Username in Comments

One really good plugin for making it more interesting for people commenting on your post is the WP-Twitip-ID Plugin that lets you “easily” integrate a Twitter ID field into your comments form for blog posts. Easy and adds great extra to you and your visitors.

Twitter Tools

Alex King´s plugin Twitter Tools adds the possibility to update Twitter when you create a new blog post and also the possibility to digest your daily, or weekly, tweets and publish to your blog. For developers the plugin also adds hooks, that lets you programatically do magic with the tweet (updating other services maybe).

Tweet This

Tweet this is simple plugin that adds a “Tweet this” link to your blog posts, making it quick and easy for a reader to tweet about your blog post.

Twitter Badge

Official Twitter Badge. Add your tweets as a widget easily to your blog using this official snippet of code available as Flash and HTML widget.

Other tools

There are hundreds of different tools out there, these are just a few we have used and come to like, please feel free to comment or contact us and we will happily update this post.

Tweet This

I use a Mac and I tweet and I am still looking for a good client (I am using Twitterific). In this post I have listed some of the clients that are available to you as a Mac user that would like to do your tweeting from the Desktop. Please feel free to add more clients in the comment field or contact me with tips if you feel I have missed some important clients.

Tweetie

Tweetie is the client I use on Mac. As other clients for Twitter, there are both a free ad-serving version and one paid, $19.95. The client is fantastic, you can use multiple accounts, easily follow conversations and quick get user details.

Twitterific

Twitterific is a client I use myself. The client comes in two flavours, free and paid for, I use the free one and have to live with the ads that run once in your stream every hour. I do not even notice the ads, and wonder why I should upgrade (except for the reason it is a good client).

Tweetr

Tweetr supports file upload (up to 10mb) by third party and is also built on top of Adobe Air.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is an application built on Adobe Air currently in Beta. Tweetdeck lets you as a user split all tweets into topics or groups of specific interest, making it easier for you to get an overview of what is happening right now in different niches you are covering.

Thwirl

Thwirl supports several lifestream services such as Twitter, identi.ca, FriendFeed and Seesmic. It also supports cross-posting to Pownce (which is dead) and Jaiku and image posting to Twitpic.

Others

Hopefully we who use Mac will see better clients for Twitter in the future. I am waiting for full Adium support for Twitter and Panic writing a client for managing your lifestreams. Until then, I will try to update this post with clients that Mac users can download if they fancy doing their updates from the desktop instead of using online twitter tools and clients.

Tweet This

How do you make sure you actually optimize the 140 character limitation given on each tweet? There are some short rules you could use in order to cut down the number of characters used and still get the message out there.

Use abbreviations

If you need to optimize your message, try to use common abbreviations for often used sentences or words. The same abbreviations you would use in chat, im or SMS is often also valid when using Twitter.

Use external services for URL shortening

One big problem with Twitter is posting urls, often url:s are very long, and take a lot of your 140 characters when posting links to something. If you like to write something that says something about the url you are posting (and that make sense to your audience) you need to use external tools for shortening of url:s. There are numerous of services for this, and a lot of clients integrates these kind of services using API:s. Below we have listed some services for shortening links and some twitter clients that support automatic shortening of posted URL:s.

URL Shortening Services

• TinyURL
• bit.ly

URL Shortening Supporting Clients

• Twitterific (Mac)
• Thwirl
• tweetr

Optimize the message

A tweet should be pretty straightforward as you only have 140 character to work with. Are there any words that you could live without posting? Could you split the message into two posts instead of one? A good rule of thumb to keep is to live by: One Tweet – One URL – One Message.

How would you do when you send SMS

Apply the messaging technique you have learnt to master when sending SMS on Twitter and you will probably come a long way. I believe that the rules opens up for creative solutions. After all, the power of micro blogging is the length of the message.

Summary

When tweeting you have the 140 characters rule to work with. You have to be smart, precise and use external tools in order to maximise the messages you are posting on Twitter. In this article we have pointed you to some ideas and tools you could use in order to achieve this.

Additional Resources

• Big List of URL Shortening Services
• Official List of Twitter Clients
• How we Tweet

Tweet This

Twitter offers a very specific functionality, allowing users to post tweets consisting of a maximum of 140 characters. First some people see the 140 characters as something that holds back functionality and areas of use, after a while a big percentage of the skeptics finds good use of the twitter tweets, finding that twitter has a natural belonging in the communication spectra somewhere between instant messaging, sms and blogging. In this post we will discuss how this microblogging tool can be integrated into your webapp and hopefully extend the functionality of your webapp and Twitter.

Twitter API

A lot of the different Web 2.0 companies that have grown into big players the last few years offers developers, bloggers and other users the possibility to consume their content via API:s. API stands for Application Programming Interface and in short it enables other systems to get structured data that easily could be used on other systems. Twitter offers an API as well. You can both use the API for reading data, and for actually update or add data as well. API:s enable the possibility to build advanced web solutions where Twitter data is a part of the applications architecture. In this article we will not go directly into different methods available in the API, we will only discuss how you could do in order to integrate Twitter using the API on a higher level.

Getting Data from Twitter

One of the easiest ways to use the Twitter API is to actually grab data from Twitter via the API, and store and massage it before presentation on your webapp. In order to do this, the only thing you need to do is to choose what data you are interested in and make sure you are using the correct methods in the Twitter API. In order to do this dynamically, you should of course your users share their screen name making it easier for you to dynamically retrieve, store and present data that your users have added to the Twitter application. There are a lot different content aggregators that do this today, FriendFeed is one of the more famous ones. If you are running a community this could be a good way for your users to advertise their twitter tweets on your community. For blog owners, this could also be a good tool to use in order to show that you do not only blog, you are writing stuff on Twitter as well. There are a lot of different solutions already that you could look into today in order to achieve this:

• Wordpress plugin
• Widgets
• Frameworks
• API documentation

Updating Twitter from Your Webapp

Now it is getting more interesting. Twitter also lets you update status messages via the API. And as we said earlier API:s main feature is the possibility to easily integrate two or more systems and share data between them. Wouldnt it be cool if someone using your system could “automagically” update their Twitter account whenever something important happens on your system. There are two things that have to be taken care of in order to make this feature valuable to the user and the Twitter network:

• The update should not happen to often because system messages may look like spam after a while, and followers may eventually stop following the user.
• The user has to either submit their credentials each time an update should be done, or they have to store their credentials on your site in order to make the updates transparently.

If you find a solution that fits your users when it comes to update interval and security and integrity, you will find you know have a very strong tool. This tool will enable you to grow the numbers of users used wisely. Lets say that Poker Site PokerSite.com decides that they will let users registered at them to connect their Twitter account in order to update the twitter account whenever the person wins money or enters a tournament where there are overlay (see definition on WikiPedia). Given that the user who plays at PokerSite.com is connected to people who more or less fancy the same thing as he/she does, these messages will probably lead to leads.

Updating Your Webapp Using Twitter

Now we are getting really groovy. How about using Twitter as a command language? Lets say you have a web application named TheApplication, you make sure that you have registered @TheApplication as a user on Twitter. There are three possible ways to go about using this user account:

• Take all messages sent to @TheApplication and use as content on your site
• Take each message sent to @TheApplication, look who sent it, see if he/she is a customer and update parts of the system connected to him/her
• Do as in points above and let the message itself be a command language with a well defined API talking to your webapp.

What must you do in order to achieve this?

• Periodically you must get your status list and look for messages sent to @TheApplication
• Scan the message for commands
• Identify sender
• Look Through User Database in order to see the sender is a valid user on your system
• Pass parsed data to your Twitter Message Command Component who do whatever you have taught him to do when he gets a message sent to him.

In order to be able to achieve the personal sending in this you have to of course store the Twitter usernames locally connected to your users. A good thing with this solution is that you do not need to store credentials (password). The user only has to share the nickname.

There is no end on how you could use this feature. You could control your home entertainment server from work, you could update working hours in salary systems, you could probably even start your water boiler via sms 2 minutes walk from home.

Data Mining Twitter and Complications Doing it

There are some services out there that do data mine (systematically retrieve data via the Twitter API) Twitter and creates new views of the content for search, tag clouds or other types of statistical views on the Twitter data. But there are some things you should know before doing this:

• The Twitter API only allows 100 requests / hour / client
• Data mining will have impact on your storage needs
• Data mining will have impact on your processing power

But if you think you can handle these restrictions, data mining the API opens up for very interesting solutions.

Summary

Twitter as well as other Web 2.0 websites offers developers and others access to their content via API. This opens up for new possibilities using Twitter. In this article we have focused on different areas of use for the Twitter API. Keep following us on more in depth articles on how to implement these solutions using technologies such as PHP, JavaScript and Java.

Tweet This