• Automatic link hashtags and grab latest tweets using Twitter API

Upcoming features

• Follow directly from stream
• Get detailed user info from stream
• See if User follows back directly
• Integrate third party services

Download the script at UserScripts

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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.

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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.

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I am increasing my use of Twitter. I have been trying to figure out whether or not I like Twitter as a daily tool, and I am leaning towards a positive answer. As I see it there are numerous of ways you could use Twitter, and I am sure I have only started with the most basic functionality (tweeting my thoughts, posts and whereabouts). In this post I will try to discuss and figure out different ways you could use Twitter.

Make sure you do not miss something

When I wake up every morning, before I hit the shower, I make sure I check teletext so I do not miss out on anything important. It would be pretty embarassing coming to work and everybody are talking about planes flying into buildings or other breaking news I easily could have managed to collect. For other people radio or morning tv serve the same purpose, but when you have small kids, morning tv is Bob the builder, Shaun the sheep and not CNN. I believe Twitter serve as my niche radio or niche teletext. As long as I follow the people in my niche, all over the world, I will surely not miss even the smallest news in my niche. As someone who is looking forward to learn more, get the news when it happens and have input for blog posts, I really appreciate this part of how to use Twitter. Of course tools such as Thwirl and Twitterific helps you on achieving this.

Promoting Your Stuff

This is a tricky part. I have seen people mixing it up pretty good, not only spamming Twitter with links back to their blogs, but also managing to actually do 140 character analysis worth reading on their own. I think this is something you should gradually manage to find a strategy for, that suits you and the ones following you. It all boils down to personal branding, do you wanna be considered a spammer or someone who adds value to other peoples tweet-list. I have actully unsubscribed to a lot of people I had higher beliefs in before I started following them. Twitter is such a powerful tool, as soon as you say something it is availble on all your followers dashboard, that forces us to have some kind of plan on how we would like other to look at us. My strategy is to always promote my blog posts, because I believe that the people who have choosed to follow me may also be interested in reading my blog posts. On top of that I try to post link to resources I find valuable. In order to promote your stuff, I think it is important that you also add value to the network through interaction and actually respond to the people who you follow or are followed by.

Feeding Content into other systems

Twitter exposes all content via API:s, this makes sure you can build applications posting to Twitter, and applications reading from Twitter. We have seen a lot of applications for updating Twitter and some applications for searching Twitter (before Twitter had search). I believe that the next step is to use Twitter as a tool for updating external system, such as posting content other social networks (yes we see that today on FriendFeed), but actually being able to trigger specific actions on the other system. Because lets be honest: Twitter is only a tool for updating with short texts, we have only started to playing with the possibilities on what we can do with such tools. 140 characters are short for stories, but long enough for sending actions, events, triggers and commands to other systems. I believe that we will start to see more system accounts on Twitter where followers can run system commands by “replying” to the system account (@system Location:New York, Group:user1,user2,user3). Maybe I am way out here, but the tools we could build are amazingly interesting. Using Twitter like this is to see Twitter as a part of your application architecture. The benefits you get is that the tool is widely spread, easy to use and have a lot of API:s.

Conclusion and Analysis

Twitter has gained an enormous amount of users in a short time, as always, the geeks where there first, and a lot of people think it is a geek thing, but, I am sure that tweeting will, as blogging has, move from the geeks to ordinary sane people with bigger interests than programming and internet. When that happens, we will see an explosion of different ways to use Twitter, or twitter-clones, enabling new features for spreading whatever users are interested to spread quickly to a wide network of connected followers. The big questions are How do you use Twitter and How do you think Twitter will evolve?

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Related posts:

1. How to integrate Twitter with your Applications

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

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Related posts:

1. How to integrate Twitter with your Applications
2. 3 Ways To Use Twitter – spamming is not one of them

Who are the right people to follow

In order to follow you gotta find someone willing to lead. There are no interest in following people who do not tweet. So where to start?

Authorities

First, find the authorities in your area of interest, authorities that will tweet and drive the debate within that area. You probably have a good sense on who these people are. When you have identified them, browser through their list of users they follow. They will probably follow people who they believe has something to say in the area of interest where themselves are seen as authorities.

The Hidden Pearls

As well as in the blogosphere, you will find people who you have not heard of but they share your area of interest and they actually have pretty cool opinions on those areas. I believe this is the strength of the twitter community and the blogosphere. Any person willing to spread and share his/her opinion will hopefully and probably get followers and readers and find platforms for spreading his or her knowledge, ideas and ramblings.

Summary

In order to follow, you need leaders, leaders can be found in the authorities section of the twitter user family. You may also find leaders that enables you to grow in your area if interest among people not yet known to the bigger audience. Twitter is a democratic tool that enables anyone to share his or her thoughts and ideas to the whole world. If you follow the right people, learn and start sharing, maybe you become the next person that is a must follow for other people. Keep up the tweeting.

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Read more on Pancheros and Twitter at Ted Murphys Blog

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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.

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Related posts:

1. How to optimize your tweets
2. 3 Ways To Use Twitter – spamming is not one of them

Twitter offers you the possibility to post 140 characters long messages to your dashboard, communicating with all the people who follow you. In addition to this your dashboard will get updated with messages from the people you follow. If you run a blog and follow and are followed by the right people you can use this to your advantage.

Twitter as Excerpt

If you use your twitter account for purposes that are similar to the goals you have for your blog, you may utilize this and possibly drive traffic both to your blog and to your twitter account. Often you see people tweeting about new blog posts they have made on their blog, hoping that their follower will see the url in the tweeting noise during peak-time. Is there a better way to use twitter to drive traffic to your blog post? Yes, I believe there is. People in your network (followers and people you follow) are probably in some way interested in the things you plan to write about on your blog (if your blog match your profile on twitter). Instead of just posting the url to a new blog post, start pushing for your blog post by starting discussions and post insightful tweets on the subject. If you manage to do this, it is a win-win for you and your followers. They get a problem or subject presented to them, with a little discussion your hook is set. They will probably be eager to read your blog post. You have used Twitter as an excerpt, dragging people in to your blog post.

Blog Article

The actual post or article should be a deep dive into the subject you have been discussing on twitter. You should of course start up pointing back to the discussion or first message on twitter that started the idea on this blog post. The article should add value to the people who were involved in the discussion on Twitter as well as the readers who have not yet discussed the issue on twitter. Be open with your twitter identity and invite your blog users to connect to you in order to add to similar discussions in the future. The article should show that you have taken input from the people you discussed with on twitter and also add extra levels of analysis, that may if done well, generate more discussions in comments and on twitter.

Connect Blog and Twitter

When the blog post is published, you should of course introduce it to you fellow tweeters as a result of your discussion and ask them to read it. Hopefully you will get quality visits to your blog who probably start subscribing to your feed, and as the discussion is out in the open on twitter, your blog post may spread to your fellows network.

Summary

Utilizing Twitter and your Blog audience may open up for new readers on your blog and new followers on Twitter. Using Twitter as a tool for bootstrapping your blog article can be a very powerful tool in order to achieve that. How do you use your blog to drive twitter followers and your twitter account to drive blog readers?

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