TWiki Twitters

Microblogging With Twitter

If you're not quite ready to write a full blog entry you might still have thoughts and comments to share about TWiki. What are you using TWiki for? Have you recently solved a problem?

Why not use Twitter?

Twitter is an increasingly popular microblogging service that lets you stay in touch no matter where you are or what you're doing. For some friends you might want instant mobile updates; for others, you can just check the web.

We have two Twitter users: @twikiorg and @twikifriends. We also have a pair of Twitter "feeds" that post

1. recent updates to the TWiki Blog
2. "re-tweets" -- cross-postings of messages from TWiki "friends"

Terminology

In Twitter, you follow other people. When you follow someone, you read their tweets - the 140-character messages they post to Twitter. You may also have followers, people who follow you and read what you post.

A friend is another word for someone you follow. This is the original word used by Twitter. You won't see it in the interface much, but it's used by the Twitter API.

Follow And Post About TWiki

The TWikifriends Twitter user @twikifriends can re-tweet your Twitter posts about TWiki, here and at http://twitter.com/twikifriends.

Follow user @twikiorg and we'll share anything you tweet about TWiki.

What To Do

1. Create a Twitter account at twitter.com if you don't already have one
2. Follow the Twitter users, @twikiorg and @twikifriends
   • Go to http://twitter.com/twikiorg and click the follow button.
   • Go to http://twitter.com/twikifriends and click the follow button.
3. Wait until receive email telling you that twikiorg is now following you.
   • You can "nudge" twikitwittersPLEASENOSPAM@cfclPLEASENOSPAM.com to speed things up. (To send mail, please remove PLEASENOSPAM.)
4. Log in to your Twitter account and post your message.
5. That's it. If you follow and post something mentioning "TWiki", it will automatically be reposted in the @twikifriends twitterfeed.

How Does This Work?

When you follow either of our two Twitter users — @twikiorg or @twikifriends — @twikiorg will follow you back. We scan the tweets of our followers every 10 minutes, filter for the word TWiki, and post the results back to Twitter at http://twitter.com/twikifriends;

We use twitterfeed.com to filter and feed our TWiki Blog RSS updates into @twikiorg. Twitterfeed runs every two hours so, if you don't see your new blog post show up right away, please be patient.

See TWikiTwittersHow for additional details.

Learn More About Twitter

• Tweeternet - a one page Twitter primer. Includes links to applications for posting to and reading Twitter
• Twitter in Plain English - video
• The Twitter Blog

TWiki-ists who Twitter

#	TWiki Name	twitter name
1	VickiBrown	vlb
2	MichaelCorbett	KobB
3	MichaelDaum	nuddlegg
4	MartinSeibert	mseibert

Discussion

Do you have a Twitter account? Tell us who you are so we can follow you too!

I'm vlb.

-- VickiBrown - 20 May 2008

More at Geek & Poke.

-- MichaelDaum - 20 May 2008

Cool. Thanks for this cool contribution.

-- MartinSeibert - 20 May 2008

Thanks for the initiative Vickie!

-- PeterThoeny - 20 May 2008

twitter.com is very slow to show the feed. Is there an RSS feed? If so we can use a %HEADLINE that caches the feed.

-- PeterThoeny - 20 May 2008

Twitter has problems today. I would hope, that this problem vanishes soon.

-- MartinSeibert - 20 May 2008

The Microblogging-concept seems to work quite good for TWiki-Twitter-Action ... But we still need more followers.

-- MartinSeibert - 22 May 2008

I'd also like to thank Vicki for her hard work in setting all this up - especially the way that the twikiorg twitter user filters for tweets with TWiki. Can Vicki (or anyone ) point me in the direction of any documentation that tells me how to do it for myself?

-- MichaelCorbett - 22 May 2008

MartinSeibert set up the filtering using twitterfeed.com. I think it just feeds the RSS of followers filtering on word TWiki. Will confirm and add info above.

-- VickiBrown - 22 May 2008

Hi Michael, as I configured Twitterfeed the way it works, I am at your command to help you redo that. Just contact me, if you want. But first take a look at Twitterfeed. That is probable enough already.

-- MartinSeibert - 22 May 2008

I just added 3 more TWiki-ist for our Twitter-Action.

-- MartinSeibert - 22 May 2008

Vicki, thanks for this tricky TWiki twitter trick

-- MichaelDaum - 23 May 2008

We have 24 possible Twitter-Microbloggers for TWiki now

-- MartinSeibert - 30 Jun 2008

Actually, 30!

And a change to the way things work. Now follow twikifriends and twikifriends will follow you! (This is the more conventional way to use twitter; the person you follow follows you back.)

Follow twikiorg for Weblog updates only. Twikiorg may follow you back but won't repost anything you send to Twitter.

-- VickiBrown - 03 Jul 2008

We've run into a problem with Twitter feeds. Things seemed to be working yesterday; today they are not. The problem is that Twitter's "friends_timeline" is also including the *user_timeline". SO, if you filter your own friends' timeline, you get your own posts back again. This is bad.

I have complained about this in the Twitter development board and filed a HELP request at twitter.com. In the meantime, we're back to where we were before. It's a bit unusual but it's simple.

Follow twikiorg and twikifriends will share your TWiki tweets. Follow twikifriends to read them. For convenience, if you follow either twikiorg or twikifriends, we'll follow you back.

I've updated the instructions to match.

-- VickiBrown - 04 Jul 2008

I have completely re-worked our twikifriends Twitter feed. We're now using pyTwerp to read the friends timeline and send tweets back. I have a lot more control over the timeing this way. (twitterfeed only checks a feed every 30 minutes at the most frequent). I will be writing this up as a Blog post rsn.

-- VickiBrown - 06 Jul 2008

New page, TWikiTwittersHow that explains the implementaton details of how TWiki twitters.

-- VickiBrown - 07 Jul 2008