Before digging into the various techniques used to display and connect to the social Web, it is important not to forget the most obvious integration tool offered: RSS feeds. In its most simple form, you’ve got the RSS widget that ships with WordPress, and it easily lets you show offcontent from an RSS feed. And today, any social Web service, app, community, or whatever has an RSS feed for you to play with, which means that a lot of the integration of these services you may want can be done using RSS.
From showing offyour latest tweet to mashing up a lifestream, it’s all about RSS most of the time. So when you want to flash your latest finished book saved to www.anobii.com, consider the RSS feed (or their widget) before you start looking for plugins or hacking your own solutions. Chances are the service you want to show offyour latest actions/ saved items/whatever from already transmits this data with RSS. You should never make things harder than they are.
There is certainly no doubt that the rise of Twitter has changed things. These days everyone and their cat tweets, at least among the techie crowd, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. So while 140 characters is quite a limitation to someone used to punching out 3,000-character weblog posts, it can still be quite a tool for online publishers.
If you or your brand are on Twitter, it is likely you’ll want to promote the Twitter account on your site. That is easily done with graphics, of course, but you can take it further than that. It works the other way as well: by promoting your content with tweets you can reach an audience that may only know you on Twitter. And that’s just scratching the surface; after all there are a ton of cool mashups and services built around Twitter and its API that you may want to mimic or at least get a piece of.
First thing’s first, building a cool new Twitter app isn’t what this article is about. However, it would most likely be a good idea to take the Twitter promotion one step further than just a small “Follow me on Twitter” graphic, right?
You can use the same method to display a search result as you did in the previous part, but for search of course. The Twitter API offers a lot of information on that, so if that’s the route you want to take then by all means dig into it: apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-Search-APIMethod% 3A-search.
However, it is good to know that a search on Twitter also comes with an RSS feed, and while displaying just the latest tweet makes sense, just relaying the latest result from a search query does not. You may be better offjust doing the search query yourself on search.twitter.com, and then grabbing the RSS feed and doing funky stuffwith it. Which is to say, output it somewhere using a plugin, the default widget.
Twitter search results can come in handy when watching trends around brands, but also for support. There are trending hashtags, for example, which may work very well as a search query everpresent on a site about the particular topic. A hashtag is a hash symbol (#) and then a word, like this #smashing or this #NotesBlog, and most of the Twitter apps out there also make them clickable. Some Web services and online products talk a lot about what’s going on as well as giving support on Twitter, and then they can use their hashtag to make sure that people interested in the topic can follow it, but also for their own means. After all, it is very easy to search for a hashtag, and the same can, of course, be extended to showing offthe results.
There are numerous widgets, plugins, services, and applications surrounding Twitter. The fairly open ecosystem around the microblogging service makes it easy to build on, and the ever-increasing buzz around the brand isn’t exactly slowing things down. That’s why you’ve got TweetMeme (tweetmeme.com) tracking the hottest stories on Twitter, as well as Twitterfeed (twitterfeed.com) that lets you post automatic links to your Twitter account using an RSS feed. The list goes on and on, and below is just a tiny little sample of the numerous Twitter services, widgets, and tools that you can put to good use. I’m focusing on things that can help your publishing, so for actual twittering applications you’ll have to look elsewhere.
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