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Why integrate twitter to wordpress?

25th April 2008, 11:22 pm

Well, I have 6+ years of content on my wordpress site, that’s why.

I just took a few minutes to look at my blog in who knows how long, and I realized that it’s pretty stale. Meanwhile, my twitter feed has been pretty good. When I post things to my blog, I want it to reflect something that will get a reasonable search engine hit count and will be something that begins or significantly contributes to some innovative project.

Twitter almost looks like threaded discussions in a (micro) blog format, but if you were trying to follow two people’s conversation on twitter, um… that’s not easy and/or impossible. Especially if you’re following a lot of people.

I just got Facebook to aggregate my twitter feed. It’s like layers of an onion at this point. Maybe I can get my MySpace page to repost my facebook feed. Honestly, will it help my brand in 5 years to have all that content spread out across multiple platforms? I’m inclined to think not. Facebook, myspace, twitter, friendster, tribe.net, linkedin, ryze, orkut… these all suck from a long term perspective if you’re serious about owning your content. There’s no guarantee that any of them will continue to exist in 5 years… But I’ll bet you a dollar that my domain will continue to exist in 5 years… So, I’m glad that twitter makes it easy to get a feed of my content out of their system because that will make it easier for my to get it into my long term storage and comment aggregating platform – WordPress. (and a thank-you-i-think to Alex King http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress for his twitter tools plugin)

update: Maaan, I don’t know what I want twitter tools to do. I don’t want my wordpress site clogging up with badly titled 160 character posts. And I don’t think digest posts of daily tweets would be good for me either.  I guess having twitter tools notify my twitter account of new posts works well because then my other pages get notified when I post something big here.  Ok, yes, that’s worth a dollar-thirty-five.

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  • steve cooley

    James said:

    Hey steve I saw the crap flood of tweets too, I know why you are doing it and it makes sense, but may I suggest some sort of aggregation of tweets.

    for example if you posted once a day (or even a few times) all the tweets up till then it would look better, cut down on the traffic and keep up the freshness factor.

    I am using friend feed through tumblr to get the effect http://rubaiyat.tumblr.com look for a twit entry…

    james

    Anything that can be made, can be made black.

  • steve cooley

    James said:

    Hey steve I saw the crap flood of tweets too, I know why you are doing it and it makes sense, but may I suggest some sort of aggregation of tweets.

    for example if you posted once a day (or even a few times) all the tweets up till then it would look better, cut down on the traffic and keep up the freshness factor.

    I am using friend feed through tumblr to get the effect http://rubaiyat.tumblr.com look for a twit entry…

    james

    Anything that can be made, can be made black.

  • steve cooley

    James said:

    Hey steve I saw the crap flood of tweets too, I know why you are doing it and it makes sense, but may I suggest some sort of aggregation of tweets.

    for example if you posted once a day (or even a few times) all the tweets up till then it would look better, cut down on the traffic and keep up the freshness factor.

    I am using friend feed through tumblr to get the effect http://rubaiyat.tumblr.com look for a twit entry…

    james

    Anything that can be made, can be made black.

  • steve cooley

    I know, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know what the plugin was going to do, otherwise I would have thought twice about doing it. I ended up killing all the tweets in my wordpress site and the consequent “new post” tweets on my twitter feed. I’m just glad it didn’t go into an infinite loop of updating my blog posts with tweets and then tweeting about new posts over and over.

    I’d rather have the option to selectively include tweets in my wordpress blog. Right now with the best in class plugin for twitter integration, you get *every* tweet, or none at all. And I don’t even think the digest option is good for me. Some things I want to say on twitter would be completely non-sequitur on my blog.

    And then I have to weigh the options.. is this worth trying to put time in to get that functionality, or do I have better things to do with my life? I’ve done a wordpress plugin in the past and it wasn’t what I would call “light programming”. Very tricky problem for me… I want to do something deep on the physical computing front, but I know that most of my time is spent doing flickr/twitter/wordpress. This feels like a workflow problem to me, that’s what’s bugging me about it all. I want some of my tweets to go into my wordpress blog, and I want it to be easy to use. I don’t want to have to think about it too often or for too long.

  • steve cooley

    I know, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know what the plugin was going to do, otherwise I would have thought twice about doing it. I ended up killing all the tweets in my wordpress site and the consequent “new post” tweets on my twitter feed. I’m just glad it didn’t go into an infinite loop of updating my blog posts with tweets and then tweeting about new posts over and over.

    I’d rather have the option to selectively include tweets in my wordpress blog. Right now with the best in class plugin for twitter integration, you get *every* tweet, or none at all. And I don’t even think the digest option is good for me. Some things I want to say on twitter would be completely non-sequitur on my blog.

    And then I have to weigh the options.. is this worth trying to put time in to get that functionality, or do I have better things to do with my life? I’ve done a wordpress plugin in the past and it wasn’t what I would call “light programming”. Very tricky problem for me… I want to do something deep on the physical computing front, but I know that most of my time is spent doing flickr/twitter/wordpress. This feels like a workflow problem to me, that’s what’s bugging me about it all. I want some of my tweets to go into my wordpress blog, and I want it to be easy to use. I don’t want to have to think about it too often or for too long.