Programming to the Twitter API (ReTweeter)

Presented today at BarCamp Boston on programming for the Twitter API, based on the retweeter project I did for SXSW this year. You can grab the slides or the code.

Went better than the WordPress talk yesterday, in terms of time - easier to describe Twitter (which everyone already knows) than to try to cover the WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the plugin I wrote to connect the two all in less than 30 minutes.

Twitter Charts via Yahoo! Pipes and Google Charts API

(Via David S. on Babbledog)

Xefer has created an intriguing mashup using data from the Twitter API, a Yahoo! Pipe to some basic transformation, and the Google Chart API to display results:

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Twitter Clouds

Check out Tweet Clouds - new app which uses the Twitter API to create a tag cloud based on your tweets, optionally suppressing @s and removing stop words.

Here’s mine (click to see full size):

I wonder how much this changes over time, or how far back they are able to grab tweets.

If a DM falls in a forest . . .

On Twitter, when you try to send a direct message to someone using the web interface, by entering “d nobody My message” (where “nobody” is a username), and the person you are trying to reach doesn’t follow you, you get a nice error message:

The same is true when you use SMS or IM to interact with Twitter.

However, if you use a Twitter client, what happens?

On Twitterific, nothing. The message appears to be sent, nothing shows up your timeline, no error occurs.

Is this a limitation of the API, or of the application’s handling of it?

Update:

@Twhirl tells me (via Twitter) that:

twhirl should display an error message informing you about it.

Maybe time to change? I sent the twitterific developers a note letting them know of the bug.

What does your twitter client do? Tell me in the comments, please.

Like Facebook, but without all the fun

The newest splash in the “Facebook in the Enterprise” race is a facebook application called “WorkBook” from a company called WorkLight.

WorkBook is apparently part of the WorkLight platform, and pricing starts at $10/user/month.

Some coverage:

• WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises (Dan Farber on ZDNet blog - with a photo)
• WorkLight enters the Enterprise Facebook Market (Bill Ives at Fast Forward Blog)
• WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work (Andrew McAfee)
• WorkBook Brings Facebook Inside the Firewall (Web Worker Daily)

McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:

In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.

But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?

Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x