Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King’s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).
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New WordPress plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet

When Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin was in its 1.x days, I published some directions on how to change the API endpoints to point to Identi.ca.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

Twitter 101: These Are Not The Cavaliers You’re Looking For

I don’t normally blog much about twitter: it seems like an already over-covered by other voices.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing an increase in twittering of dubious value. For example, automatically following (or stalking, as Ari Herzog put it) folks who mention a given term, and overly friendly twitter accounts purporting to be young women who want you to see their ’special’ photos on other sites. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s also seen lots of new followers whose usernames look suspiciously like they were generated by a script – JohnSmith18273, JaneDoe45039.

This week, for example, Ann from MarketingProfs mentioned that her dogs – King Charles Cavalier Spaniels – are staying with my wife and I while she’s out of town. Then rt_cavs retweeted it:

Indiscriminate Retweeting

The problem, of course, is that her dogs have nothing to do with the Cleveland Cavaliers. I don’t think Cavs fans are so enthralled with their team as to be interested in the dogs, or the cars, or any of the other things cavalier might mean.

When keyword matching twitterbots are at their best, they can broadcast tweets of interest to a broader community who might otherwise not have seen it. In cases like this, though, they just reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

Selfish APIs

Photo by Uncle Bartelby

Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.
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Tracking Keywords in Twitter

Tracking the occurrence of keywords in twitter through one of the automated tools is a quick way to add value to your experience.

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).
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