All posts tagged ‘Twitter’

File Under: APIs, Web Services
Dec
9
2011

Getting Started With Twitter’s Embedded Tweets Feature

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Embed a tweet in any webpage

Somewhat lost amidst the news of Twitter’s revamped interface is a slightly more interesting tidbit for web developers: Twitter posts can now be embedded in other pages.

The new Embedded Tweet feature works just like a YouTube movie, offering a short HTML snippet that you can copy and paste into any third-party website. Unfortunately using the Embed Tweet feature from Twitter is somewhat awkward since it’s buried in the new interface. First you need to click on a tweet, then click “details” and then you’ll see the embed option.

The real benefit of the embed feature lies with third party platforms like Twitter’s two launch partners WordPress and Posterous. Users of both services can now simply paste a link to a tweet and it will automatically be converted to an embedded tweet, no cut and paste necessary. For example, just drop this code in your WordPress.com blog and it will automatically be converted to an embedded tweet:

[tweet https://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/133640144317198338]

If you’d like to implement something similar on your own site Twitter now has an OEmbed endpoint you can query to convert Twitter links to embedded tweets. Those not familiar with OEmbed can check out our OEmbed tutorial, but, in a nutshell, OEmbed is a standard format where you send a URL and the host site then sends back the necessary embed code.

There are three steps to Twitter’s OEmbed process:

  1. Obtain an URL to or ID number of the Tweet you want to render.
  2. Make a request to the GET statuses/oembed endpoint, passing the Tweet URL or ID as a query parameter.
  3. Render the html property of the response, as well as a <script> element pointing to //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js, if you want the embed to be interactive.

If you choose to render the tweet using Twitter’s widgets.js, the raw HTML will be converted into an interactive tweet. The fancy embedded tweet script uses Web Intents to allow users to reply, retweet, or follow the user directly from the embedded tweet. See the Twitter developer site for more details on Twitter’s widgets.js and how to use OEmbed to embedded tweets to your website.

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File Under: Social, Web Services
Dec
8
2010

Twitter Adds More Media-Sharing Services to Inline Previews

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Twitter now offers inline previews for more services, like the popular Instagram.

Twitter has expanded the integration of third-party services on its website, adding five new photo and video sharing services to the growing list of what shows up as an inline preview.

Among the new services to secure a spot in the ever-expanding Twitterverse is Instagram, the current darling of the Twitter hipsters. The photo-sharing service has managed to build an impressive following even though it’s currently only available as an iOS app. The majority of Instagram fans use Twitter to post links to their artsy photos.

The other new services available as inline previews include videos from Blip.tv, music players from Rdio, slideshows and presentations from SlideShare and photos and videos from Dipdive.

The new inline preview feature, introduced in September’s make-over, shows a preview of an image or a video in the right-hand pane whenever somebody tweets a link to a supported video or photo site. At launch, that was Flickr, Vimeo, TwitPic and YouTube. Along with the inline previews, you also see associated conversations, recent tweets and mini bios of the people mentioned in the tweet. It’s a feature we really like — it takes Twitter beyond the 140 character limit to include photos, videos, maps and all sorts of other rich media.

While we’re happy to see Twitter integrating with more web services, the new web-based preview features highlight just how far behind the website the company’s official mobile apps have fallen. Neither the official Android client nor the iOS Twitter clients support any of the inline previews you’ll find on the web. Twitter’s mobile site doesn’t show them, either. For a richer mobile Twitter, you’ll need to turn to third-party mobile apps.

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File Under: Social
Nov
16
2010

Bundle a Bunch of Sites Behind One Bit.ly Link

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Link shortening service Bit.ly has unveiled a new link bundling feature that allows you to group multiple links — up to 100 — on a single page and share that page with your friends with a single short URL.

If you’ve been looking for a way to share more than one link at a time with your Twitter followers — perhaps links to both sides of an argument, a collection of your favorite restaurants in New York, or collected coverage of some major, earth-shattering news event — a Bit.ly bundle fits the bill.

Link-shortening services such as Bit.ly have seen an explosion in popularity in the past few years thanks to the steady growth of Twitter, Facebook and other services which limit posts to bite-sized bursts of 140 to 420 characters. Bit.ly remains a powerful link-shortening service with over four billion unique URLs shortened. The company also offers some stand-out features like stat-tracking for each link, automatic QR Code generation, some open APIs and support for popular social web technologies like OAuth.

Now that you can wrap multiple links inside a single Bit.ly URL, it becomes even easier to squeeze more info into a single tweet.

If you’re thinking that a page of links would be pretty boring, well, Bit.ly seems to have had the same thought. The company has integrated media previews of images and videos, as well as any titles, descriptions and notes you want to add to your links.

Bit.ly bundles can also function as a group collaborating tool, your friends can comment on your bundles and even build their own based on your starting points. It also makes Bit.ly a more valuable service, rather than just a middleman of necessity standing between a URL and Twitter.

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File Under: APIs, Identity, Web Services
Oct
29
2010

Connect to Twitter Without OAuth

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OAuth is a great way to sidestep the dilemma of having to hand over passwords to third-party sites and apps to access user data. This is the primary reason the authentication method is fast becoming a de riguer part of today’s social APIs.

But while OAuth solves one problem, it creates another — it greatly raises the complexity of simple apps.

We’ve looked at the issue in the past, particularly with regard to Twitter’s transition to OAuth, which broke countless small scripts. The good news is that OAuth 2.0 is less complex than its predecessor and removes much of the headache for small developers. Unfortunately, OAuth 2.0 isn’t widely adopted yet, and it’s not quite ready for prime time.

But there is a solution for Twitter. SuperTweet was created by developer David Beckemeyer. The service sits between your script and Twitter, where it does the heavy lifting of OAuth for you. Even better, you don’t have to hand over your Twitter password to SuperTweet — instead, you create a password on the site, approve SuperTweet to access your Twitter account and then connect your script to SuperTweet.

The service isn’t meant for full-blown apps, nor does it support commercial uses. But for individuals and non-profits without the development resources to make the switch to OAuth 2.0, it can bring those simple Twitter scripts back to life.

Of course using SuperTweet means adding another potential failure point between your script and Twitter, but if you can live with that, using SuperTweet is easier than wading into OAuth’s waters.

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File Under: Social, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats

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If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Continue Reading “ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats” »

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File Under: Social, UI/UX, Web Apps
Sep
16
2010

Take a Tour of the New Twitter

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Twitter launched a full redesign to its website Tuesday, showing off changes that lead Twitter.com away from its humble stream-of-updates past and towards a more interactive, app-like future.

The new Twitter went live to a select few users Tuesday afternoon and began rolling out to everyone else Wednesday. If you don’t see it yet, you will soon.

The website now has a new two-panel view. Your familiar stream of tweets runs down the left side. On the right side is a dashboard of sorts, where you can see recent activity from your followers and the people you follow, trending topics, and the list of people you might want to follow.

Continue Reading “Take a Tour of the New Twitter” »

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File Under: APIs, Social
Aug
30
2010

Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh

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Twitter is killing support for basic user authentication in third-party apps on Tuesday morning, the company says. Instead, Twitter will now require all third-party app developers to use OAuth for user authentication.

This is a planned move Twitter first announced in December, and the company has posted a help page on its developer site with some resources meant to ease the transition to OAuth.

The Twitter API team has been dialing down the number of requests an app can make using the basic authorization method. That number will hit zero at 8AM Pacific time Tuesday.

Some bloggers have given the event the catchy name, “OAuthcalypse” — a bit of a mouthful, but so is “user authentication protocol” — the implication being that when basic authentication is switched off, it will break old software and leave users in the dark. But since Twitter has given developers ample warning of the change, the switch will only lock out a small number of apps.

Twitter’s move mirrors a broader trend on the social web, where basic authentication is being ditched for the more secure OAuth when services and applications connect user’s accounts.

In basic authentication, a website or app will say, “Hey, do you want to share whatever you’re doing here with your friends on Twitter? Give me your Twitter username and password and I’ll hook up your accounts.” By passing along your info, you’re giving that app or website unlimited access to everything in your Twitter account. Pretty dangerous, and not secure.

In OAuth authentication, the website or app will send you to Twitter where you sign yourself in, then Twitter will tell the website or app “Yeah, they are who they say they are.” The website or app only gains the ability to do certain things with your account — post, read, reply, search — while staying locked out from the more sensitive stuff.

Continue Reading “Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh” »

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File Under: Social, UI/UX
Jun
30
2010

Cliqset Cleans Up Streams, Integrates Twitter

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Cliqset completed a significant upgrade to its social sharing website Wednesday.

The site now fully integrates Twitter, and it has refined its aggregation system so you get a much more streamlined, easy-to-digest view of your friends’ activities across multiple social sites.

There are literally dozens of changes, both visible and behind-the-scenes, in the new Cliqset. We’ve been testing out the new version (the company is half-jokingly calling it “Cliqset 2.0″) since midday Tuesday, and we’ve found the site has been given a significant boost that makes its aggregation features both more usable and more useful. The changes should be appearing for everyone on Cliqset sometime Wednesday morning.

Cliqset is a social network in itself, complete with followers, status updates and media sharing. But its sweet spot is as an aggregation service. It funnels all of the posts from the people you follow on the web into one single stream. It pulls in Twitter tweets, photos from your Flickr contacts, posts from your Tumblr network, updates from your friends on Facebook, Google Buzz, Yelp, YouTube, Google Reader — Cliqset connects to over 80 services in all.

It sounds, looks and works a lot like FriendFeed. But unlike FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook last year and has largely stagnated since, Cliqset continues to innovate.

Here’s one really cool new innovation: When you’re following somebody across multiple social networks and aggregating their posts in one place, you’re going to get a lot of duplicates. The new Cliqset filters out those dupes.

“If somebody’s on three different networks, we’ll know that,” Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey. “We’ll consolidate their posts, de-duplicate the posts, refine them.”

Continue Reading “Cliqset Cleans Up Streams, Integrates Twitter” »

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File Under: Social, Web Services
Jun
23
2010

Twitter Now Lets You Automatically Follow Your Facebook Friends

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Twitter is launching some new tools that let you easily add your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn connections to the list of people you follow on the social network. If your friends from Facebook and LinkedIn are on Twitter, you can use the Twitter’s official apps on those social networks to start following them with one click.

This should be a boon to people who are interested in homogenizing their online social experiences, because it lets them follow everyone they know across three of the major social web platforms out there. Of course, some prefer to keep their chocolate and peanut butter separate — they can just ignore these tools and keep on livin’.

The change was announced on the Twitter blog Wednesday afternoon:

Our Facebook app… now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly and save them to a list. The app also lets you post your Tweets to your Facebook profile and now, to one of your Facebook pages too. With the Tweets application by LinkedIn, you can see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. The app also lets you save your LinkedIn connections as a list, post your Tweets to LinkedIn, and add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

These enhancements to the Facebook and LinkedIn tools should be listed in Twitter’s Find Friends section soon.

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File Under: CSS
Jun
14
2010

Twitter Fail Whale Rendered in Pure CSS

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Here’s Twitter’s unofficial mascot drawn solely using cascading stylesheets, by Subcide’s Steve Dennis. What you see above is just an image — read Steve’s post or jump straight to the demo to see the real thing.

It looks great in all modern browsers (basically, everything newer than IE8) and if you look at it in Safari or Chrome, you’ll notice it’s even animated using WebKit-specific CSS animation controls.

From his blog post: “Curves are done using various uneven border-radius properties, stranger angles (such as the strings) are masked using containers with overflow: hidden; set on them. I hope someone else gets a bit of enjoyment out of my wasted Sunday.” Hardly a waste, Steve.

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