Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Paul’s plea for help integrating Twitter with Wordpress has got my hacker juices flowing again and I spent some time today fiddling with this integration challenge. It is the end of the day and I have something working here.  The first thing to sort out was what are our goals.   So first noodling around different questions like  “why tweet in the first place?” and “if your are tweeting your blog post is the tweet the same as the title of the post?” and so on. My answer, simple; I’ve decided to start using status updates on social networks (tweets) in ways that might help others when I find something of potential value. And I came to the conclusion by the way that a tweet about a blog post isn’t or shouldn’t necessarily be the same as the title of the post.  One is the title the other is a teaser (the tweet) to get someone to the post.

I think the most interesting outcome for me was the realization that the global tweet stream might actually have some hidden potential value for the semantic web.  what I once thought was a fairly useless communal stream of consciousness, the endless stream of twitter messages about silly things and foolishness, might actually contain hidden semantic gems.

It turns out there is a common subset of twitter messages that follow the same pattern of semantic metadata.  For example many messages are commonly in the form of;  “Mike Axelrod is going to the Rochester Museum and Science center today http://www.rmsc.org/“  This twitter message actually contains some fairly decent semantic data.  It’s in a nice concise triple form (subject, predicate object) it’s just not quite consumable by machines, yet (that is to say, not in the RDF, OWL)  Hint, Hint  folks, we could have something interesting here.  As it stands if we just filter for all the tweets that have URLS we might have some interesting semantic data to mine.  Tweets are so short that if they do contain an url typically it will be just one.  This guarantees us a semantic triple every time. The sender, the comment and the url.

Ok on to the second part of this post. So how do I actually fit this whole tweeting, twittering foolishness into my lifestyle?  Well here’s what I came up with so far.  First of all  I only want one point of entry for my tweets.  One client, one ping to rule them all. So naturally I’m gravitating to ping.fm.  This tool allows me to route a single status update  (tweet) to all the social networks I use.  This would be LinkedIn, Facebook, and (it seems) twitter now.   Next I want a better client experince than what a web page can offer.  It’s just not conducive to the way I work to have to navigate to an url when I want to post an update. additionally some of the clients have a very concise format and play well on my desktop.   And finally I want control over where tweets go.  Sometimes to linkedIn, sometimes to Facebook, sometimes to both and sometimes to my Wordpress blog.  So ping.fm gives me this fine grained behavior with one exception. To route tweets to my wordpress blog I had to install the ping.fm wordpress plugin, which I’m happy to say works like a charm. (<–look over there in my sidebar and you’ll see it.)

Now there is only one missing piece of the puzzle. Of all the front ends to ping.fm I tried. None of them had all the features I wanted.  Twitterific is wonderfully simple but only works with Twitter, Tweetdeck works well but only gives me the choice to send to Twitter or Facebook.  Twhirl is getting much closer to what I need and has almost everything except one critical feature. The ability to easily pick which ping.fm group I wan to send to. The last one I tried today does this! It’s called MePing but alas it does almost nothing else, compared to the others I tried. (It’s very beta) Well I’m not giving up and I’m sure very quickly one of these clients will fit my full set of requests. I have the feeling we are in a horse race right now and if you are reading this post 6 months from now many of the above mentioned clients will have everything you need (or will have dropped out of the market.)

There is plenty more to explore with twitter intrgration to websites. I certainly won’t be spending a great deal of time looking at all of this but I do believe there may be some value to discover, if applied correctly.