BirdHerd Blog

BirdHerd heading to Chirp!

2010-04-14T12:29:00Z

BirdHerd is heading down to San Francisco for Chirp, Twitter’s first ever developer conference. Looks like there will be some great technical talks, and I’m stoked to see more about how Twitter is using Hadoop and Pig for big data analysis, something I’ve been working on recently.

For BirdHerd, I’m especially interested to see developments around the “contributors api”. Exciting times for sure. If you’re at Chirp, and would like to learn more about BirdHerd, ping me on Twitter!

How to display your tweets on your blog

2010-02-09T01:42:03Z

There are many ways to display your tweets on your blog, but for the BirdHerd blog, we modified a jQuery plugin to suck our recent Tweets into our WordPress sidebar. The original plugin, Tweet! can be found here, but we found a couple small glitches in the regex that is used to create links in the tweet-to-html conversion. There was also a bunch of extra features that we just didn’t need, so we rolled a stripped down “TweetLite” plugin with the fixes.

You can grab it here if desired or click here to see it in it’s entirety.

Why BirdHerd

2010-02-09T02:19:38Z

I built BirdHerd because I needed a way for the many startups I work with to use Twitter effectively.

In the past, we always just shared a common password, but this became troublesome when a team member would leave and we’d have to change the password, and then we’d have to tell everyone what the new password is. Or someone would forget the password, reset it it to something new, and effectively lock everyone out. Needless to say, this was not ideal, and had the undesired effect of causing people to not update the group Twitter account as often as they could.

Next, I started looking at a few existing Twitter tools, but I definitely wanted something that would work from any client or device. Our team members use TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMS and the Twitter web site, and I knew that if they had to log into a different web app to update the group account (like other group Twitter tool CoTweet forces you to do), the updates wouldn’t flow as fast as they could/should. I also wanted to use oAuth to manage passwords safely. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to both communicate publicly by posting messages from the Twitter account, but I also wanted to be able to send a private group message to all my team members (through a DM).

I couldn’t find such a tool, and so, with a firm belief that there had to be a better way, BirdHerd was born – and now it’s here! I hope it makes using Twitter with your group or team easy. It has for us!