Twitter

“A modern gimmick for all those with too much time on their hands” - that was my first impression of twitter which, in retrospective, was wrong. By this time my view of twitter has changed and I am using the service nearly on a daily basis to publish interesting URLs and findings on the net which would be too short or unimportant to warrant their own blogposting. Today I thought about ways in which I could mesh twitter with this blog in a more meaningful way. On the one hand, the blogs' startpage will now show the five most recent postings that contain a URL on the right side of the screen and I will usually also write a short text before each URL to explain what it is about.

On the other hand, I also wanted to show the discussions and opinions on blogentries here in the blog. Basically something like trackbacks just coined for Twitter. This was not a trite undertaking seeing how there is no interface or anything similar for this. So I build my own script with the help of Twitters search function which regularly queries Twitter for new blogposting references and adds them where applicable. A small hurdle in this was the fact that, in general, the real URL is not used in Twitter (because there are only 140 characters available) and services like Tinyurl are resorted on which provide short-URLs that redirect to the actual page. At the moment the script is supporting Tinyurl, Bitly, ls.gd, Cli.gs and Thomas' splendid Redir.ecsistrix” - from time to time, there will be links and hints that I will not make available here on the blog like the PDF “10 questions for the future SEO-agency” a few days ago.

Johannes Beus - on Tue (03/17/2009) at 11:15 AM

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