twitter tools and tweetsuite
This post looks briefly at two plugins that integrate WordPress and Twitter. I spend a lot of time with each, and this kind of integration makes sense in theory, but I have not yet seen it work incredibly well in practice.
Both Twitter Tools and TweetSuite have options to enable widgets for displaying tweets (including favorited tweets in TweetSuite) and also give the option to auto-tweet when you publish a post.
The developer-described “experimental” digest features of Twitter Tools were the main draw for me to test this WordPress plugin by Alex King. I wanted to see what happens when you extract a specimen of Twitter text and consider it out of context. At the very least, I could have an archive of my tweets.
However, missing for me in the Twitter Tools digest is the option to collect this daily or weekly digest as an Unpublished draft, which would allow me to comment, edit and tag before it goes live, or even chose to keep it private (on account of being extra boring or annoying).
Apparently this plugin isn’t being actively developed anymore, which does not bode well for its usefulness in the future.
The other Twitter-based plugin I’ve tested recently is Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite. TweetSuite generates trackback-like “tweetbacks” that post automatically when anyone twitters a link to a blog page. The list of tweets at the end of the article on Zarella’s page is probably the best(?) example the tweetback display in full force.
To see it on my site, I sent a tweet about my own post, and at the end of that post, voilà! you see the tweet that the twitterverse saw. (You can go ahead and ignore the lame fact that that post has one comment and one tweetback and both are from me :~p what I learned on that post helped me produce a page that got over 3,300 views in one day!)
Neither Twitter Tools nor TweetSuite does it all for me yet, nor are they right for the Mālamalama magazine site. Both my sites may be too non-techie for it to ever take hold, but who knows, even Mālamalama is on Twitter now, so maybe one day…?!
20/01/2009 at 12:18 pm Permalink
i love TweetSuite and TwitterTools, thus far, but with Tweetbacks anytime someone tweeted about a post it would show up in the comments section of my sidebar, with TweetSuite this is not so…are you experiencing this, as well, i wonder?
20/01/2009 at 4:19 pm Permalink
Hi Jon Ray, no I havent noticed that probably b/c I dont have comments going to a sidebar widget right now and am not using the Tweetbacks plugin alone, rather went for the whole TweetSuite. Will play with it and let you know if anything.
Have you hit up http://danzarrella.com/ yet?
01/02/2009 at 6:30 am Permalink
Jeela, I’m still a little lost about Twitter in general. Apart from live coverage of major events (eg inauguration, terrorist attacks) what does Twitter offer of value?
02/02/2009 at 2:34 pm Permalink
helloooo Cynapse :~j
you def touched on one major aspect that gives HUGE value to twitter, that is, coverage during live events. But in practice, live updates dont have to be major to be useful. Could also be a traffic report, a deal of the day, bad weather across town, etc… that LIVE aspect is riveting, fast-paced and (who knew) incredibly useful!
Another valuable facet of twitter is the exchange of professional information and the things you can learn, simply by following people who have similar interests or are leaders in your field. For someone interested in technology, this is probably true times a billion, but other fields are def very active, too.
Wont deny there is a lot of noise, fukkery, funny stuff, etc, which creates what the NY Times called “ambient awareness” which is what you have when you know the minutia of your friends’ lives (i.e. all the trivial but real stuff that makes up the vast majority of the content) without rly connecting directly
Some celebrities and artists also Twitter and interact with fans. Erykah Badu and Jay Electronica just twittered the birth of their baby lol, and both do interact with fans which makes me, as a fan, just super stoked. Levar Burton is very twitter famous, too, funny guy. Anyway, that’s probably not the kind of value you meant, but, it’s fun *shrug*
dag, see, you almost made me write a whole new post here! Hope we can talk some more soon, very inspiring, thx!
08/02/2009 at 4:53 pm Permalink
Do NOT use TweetSuite, it will slow down your blog!
It is written improperly. It attempts to use the tr.im bookmarklet to shorten the URL (indeed the author didn’t even have the courtesy to use the tr.im API). API like traffic for tr.im must use the API, that is what it is there for. Additionally it wouldn’t work even if he had written it improperly because he doesn’t understand how some URL shorteners such as tr.im work.
The author has refused to fix his wordpress plugin and remove tr.im. It has generated an enormous amount of traffic to a free service that we pay for out of our pocket. As a result tr.im is banning any traffic coming from a blog using this plugin. This will slow down your pageloads for several seconds before it times out on its connection to tr.im.
24/02/2009 at 12:48 am Permalink
well, that’s kind of interesting
I removed TuiteSweet because my blog does not need it anyway, but I think it’s a cool app. Hopefully you guys can work something out.
Not sure why I’m surprised to find out the the url-shortening business is serious biz lolz