More Twitter
Posted by Bug-E on March 20th, 2007
So, after being bullied (haha!) into writing about what I’ve done with Twitter, here it is.
Twitter, if you recall, is this rather simple public update system where you can post to the site (via the site, via IM or via sms) a status update of “What are you doing?”. Like a voyeuristic view into your life.
So while playing with the site a bit (Yes, I even tried it a few times, I still do every now and again, no idea why), I found that they had a bunch of news related updates flowing through their public timeline page. “Ah”, I thought. Some lines of PHP (Yes Neil, I *know*), an hour later, and I had an updater that took IOL’s frontpage news stories and stuck them into Twitter’s timeline of updates. Tada! Some more tinkering to not publish duplicates, and a cron entry, and it now sticks a new, unique headline for IOL’s frontpage into the twitter timeline. Nothing hugely special, just a little bit of Twitter API voodoo. The IOL Twitter user currently has 96 followers, and it’s done over 2500 updates of news tidbits since I started it. For March alone so far, I’ve had a mere 150-odd people click and follow one of the update links, but hey, that’s not the point.
The Twitter API is rather straight-forward, accessible via HTTP using GET or POST methods, all sending some XML through the connection. Authentication happens using a basic auth challenge. As I said, nothing special, but straight forward, and it gets the job done.
March 21st, 2007 at 08:34:47
My motto for this year is “keep it simple”. I like your approach
March 21st, 2007 at 16:24:47
Nice, very lateral. I deleted my twitter account because I saw no constructive use for it. Now that you have opened my mind to the possibilities, I may just sign up again…
March 21st, 2007 at 16:38:41
Actually, I TRIED to delete my Twitter account, but they seem to have the same policy as a Cape Town street gang: once you’re in, you can’t get out. I get a timeout when I click delete, but everything else on the site works just fine.
March 21st, 2007 at 19:05:40
Haha, yes.
“You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!”
I’ve had slowness issues with Twitter since I started using it. I don’t think they anticipated the big take-up that the site was going to have. From what I can see, they started with a mobile-only model, then expanded onto web.