Twitter features

[AmericanForum.com]

Did a quick search and couldn't find what XF is implementing with Twitter.

Can anybody chime in on this ?

Again I need what IPB already has in core and that is the ability to post to Twitter directly from

the website ...

Also ... ideally I would like to award trophies based on the member posts that received

x number of tweets.

 

[AmericanForum.com]

Ah yes. I misunderstood your post.

Time for pm.

 

[Dean]

Well for example I run a motorsport site and after every F1 race we tweet the overtakes, yes really, people are interested in stuff like that.

So I open my Twitter page and tweet the following:

#F1 overtaking analysis and data for the Italian GP now available http://bit.ly/b5PTcv

Anyone who follows the #F1 tag will see that tweet, as will anyone who is following me.
Anyone else can re-tweet the message which will in turn be seen by their followers, and so on.

The end result is it drives traffic to my site.

And if they were to be fed into your xf forums status messages, or signatures? From sites that compete with your site?

 

[feldon30]

I can't grasp Twitter, it confuses the hell out of me, granted that isn't a feat that takes a lot.

Think SMS Reply-to-All for exhibitionists and celebrities.

It's like text messages that everyone can read. Except that it's impossible to easily follow a discussion between people using twitter.com. You just see "in reply to <link>" and you have to keep following the links back to the original tweet. Twitter.com is lousy at allowing you to see the web of communication between Twitter users. Really I don't understand why the website is successful at all -- it's an abysmal implementation.

Also, I can't even get a thought started in 140 characters.

 

[AmericanForum.com]

" Twitter.com is lousy at allowing you to see the web of communication between Twitter users. "

In other words Traffic from Twitter is working for your forum ... whereas Traffic from Facebook will eventually end up back on Facebook.

 

[Peggy]

Also, I can't even get a thought started in 140 characters.

Ha, and I thought that was just me...

 

[DoctorWatsOn]

Also, I can't even get a thought started in 140 characters.

But, you're not female.

*runs like hell*

 

[Peggy]

But, you're not female.

*runs like hell*

 

[DoctorWatsOn]

That'll do me - lol.

 

[ArnyVee]

A "Tweet This!" button or link would definitely benefit the xF forum owners, for sure. It was announced in June that Twitter had over 190 million users sending 65 million 'tweets' per day! It's grown since then, but those numbers are staggering! Add to that the fact that stars from the entertainment world and politics are involved on it and you have a great platform for communication.

As "AmericanForum.com" mentioned, the most important feature to Twitter, in my opinion, is the fact that you are driving traffic TO your forum and not away from it like you do with Facebook.

If there is not an integrated Twitter feature with xF during beta or early versions of Gold, then we can still use services like TwitterFeed where you use your RSS feeds to generate the Tweets. But, it would be SO much better to do it directly to avoid having all 10 or 20 Tweets go out at once as most of those services due based on your news feeds reporting out.

So, in summary.....we want a "Tweet This!"

 

[AmericanForum.com]

The most important feature to Twitter, in my opinion, is the fact that you are driving traffic TO your forum and not AWAY from it like you do with Facebook.

This point can not be emphasized enough.

 

[Crazyfruitbat]

In other words Traffic from Twitter is working for your forum ... whereas Traffic from Facebook will eventually end up back on Facebook.

This is very true - I have used both twitter and facebook to throw my site out there and facebook neeeeever brings traffic back to you. The conversations all stay in facebook, and why? because it's where the non-hardcore go during lunch - they see something comment, never follow a link.

Twitter on the other hand is a totally different ball game - though doing it correctly is like balancing on a knife.

My site gets lots of traffic from twitter - I think it is matching my google search traffic. Because we keep normal conversations going on twitter mixed with our links it creates a nice comfy zone where people are happy to visit the site. If you bombard people with links they won't bother, but give people a reason to follow you and the rewards are pretty good.
Not only that, I posted a thread in the forums asking people to use an auto retweeter website and they instantly jumped at it and now we get an instant tweet without having to do anything. As an example, a couple of weeks ago I posted a very simple video, everyone retweeted it and it got almost 3,000 hits overnight - you can see here

When I upload my podcast every week (which is another great way of getting your site noticed) I simply add the word 'PLEASE RE-TWEET' at the end of the twitter post with the url and then just watch people retweet your url over and over again - potentially accessing thousands of people.

Granted we have worked hard to build a large twitter following (about 5k of people) but it pays off a huge amount both for my site and my podcast. In the beginning my podcast was getting only Uk listeners - now we have listeners in South Africa and the US.

Treat twitter people correctly and you can have big rewards, though if you are an idiot and spam them you have no chance.

P.S. if you like video game please follow @s4g

 

[AmericanForum.com]

it will be folly not to include Twitter in XF

 

[Ashley]

Come on Mike, with the talent and speed at which you guys move, you can do this during a coffee freak.

Mike is not a freak... and he doesn't have coffee breaks

 

[Luke F]

Except that it's impossible to easily follow a discussion between people using twitter.com. You just see "in reply to <link>" and you have to keep following the links back to the original tweet. Twitter.com is lousy at allowing you to see the web of communication between Twitter users. Really I don't understand why the website is successful at all -- it's an abysmal implementation.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40617

 

[AmericanForum.com]

Mike is not a freak... and he doesn't have coffee breaks

sorry that I was typo

 

[SchmitzIT]

What about the ability to not only offer a "Tweet this" button, but at the same time allow your users to fill their Twitter account into their profiles, which ends up in their latest 5 tweets being shown in their profiles? (I'm thinking of somethin similar to the "Engage Twitter" mod by Zachary for 3.*), and the ability to automatically have new threads pushed towards Twitter from the forum?

And I personally will commit to buying an additional license on top of the ones I already am planning on buying if there can be a feature similar to an RSS feed where I can define a Twitter Account to follow, and report tweets made on it to a specific forum on my site.

As in: I add a watch on the EntropiaPlanets Twitter account in the admin mod, which ought to be reposted to the "EntropiaPlanets news" section on my forum. A cron job then checks for new tweets every 5 minutes, and when it finds them automatically adds them. (Note, I cannot check Twitter to check if RSS feeds in this fashion do exist there, as the corporate firewall blocks it).

 

[Chromaniac]

adding a tweet button is not rocket science i had like to have a deeper integration so that i do not have to do the manual hacks for the same!

 

[Andy Huang]

Bringing up an old-ish thread...
I think the real features I'd need out of this one are:
Push new status update from XF to your Twitter account w/ a link to your XF profile.
Pull new status updates from Twitter to your XF account.
Authenticate via Twitter (same as FB Connect, except with Twitter's OAuth).

Pulling/pushing avatars would be kind of neat, but since we don't have it for Facebook, and we don't always share as much information on forums than microblog/SNS, it is not as high on the priority queue in my books.

Just a thought.

 

[Chromaniac]

twitter authentication is i believe already planned.

 

[David McHenry]

I agree ... the other thing to consider is that with Facebook you are merely making the worlds biggest forum bigger ... in the end your users will simply abandon you (give it time as FB improves)

Sure looks that way doesn't it. With their new "Groups" feature that I'm sure will expand to accomodate more users eventually (maybe even as a paid service) forums are going to slowly become like newsgroups.