I recently discovered Twitter for myself. By discovered i mean started using, as i didnt see much usefullness in the service earlier plus didnt know anybody using it. However seeing that twitter seems to have survived the initial ‘shock and awe’ phase of all new webapps i started testing it out.
You can follow my tweets on ‘swoopdk‘ should you be so inclined 🙂
Integration is the key
With the myriad of social websites as well as MSN and other services have at least some of them integrated centrally is key. I know i would never go about updating a status message on several different networks, simply just a waste of time. Seeing as Facebook has become extremely popular here (Denmark) i wanted to be able to update Twitter from FB Status message, and vice versa.
The reason is simple, i want to give people the twitter option, but at the same time only want to update 1 place and have that update migrate automatically. So much easier 🙂
So immidiately after getting twitter installed i started my integration search.
Twhirl
Before i even started i wanted a desktop application on my laptop for using twitter. The choice fell upon Twhirl. Simple easy interface, nicely designet and does the job perfectly. I have it running on all my computer now, and it updates with a small discreet beep when there is updates.
Now i never open the twitter homepage anymore unless i need to set something up, or change my profile. Could propably also be done via twhirl but it doesn’t happen that often.
Facebook Twitter application
There is a nice official Facebook application from twitter that updates your FB status with the most recent tweet. When i first signed up there was some trouble with twitter, and it would not allow me to login. However it seems to have resolved as its working now. However it says that facebook limits the number of updates pr. day, but not how many the limit is. So if it’s not working that is propably the issue. Here is the FB App for Twitter
I havent figured out if the Twitter application does the other way around, but doesnt seem to be the case. But in the days i could not login into the FB Twitter application i stumbled across another application, designed to update the other way around, thus from Facebook to Twitter. FB2Twitter
Instructions are simple with 2 steps. And it works wonders! So now we have two way integration between Facebook and Twitter. This allows me to simply update my Twitter and in a short while the update will migrate to Facebook.
Integrate more!
As a closing bonus note i installed twitter updates on my website as well. I am running WordPress, and there is a lovely plugin available called Twitter Tools. Now my twitter updates can be displayed on the widget sidebar on my site, and when i am logged in as admin i can post tweets directly from the site. It updates every 15 mins which should be suffecient for most users 😀
Happy twitting people ! 😉
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