Version 1.0 (updated 11 Feb 09)
Requires: WordPress 2.6 (could work with lesser)
Tested up to : WordPress 2.7b3
This plugin is no longer supported, please download TwitterLink-Comments which will do a much better job and will still be able to use the existing database table and labels.
So, I was like
later that night
A good friend said..
3 minutes later… (at 4:49am my time)
about a femto second later..
All while I was asleep in bed…
I’m not crying (much) but I would have loved to get an invite, I watched the looong google wave video last week recorded at IO and was totally impressed by the ability to collaborate with others without having to say, “hey, lets collaborate on something” . I’d love to get an account just to connect with other plugin authors, imagine the awesomes that we could produce for WordPress if we put our heads together?
If you have an invite and want me to bear your children to better the world by giving one to me, I’d love it 
andrewgbailey (at) gmail.com
I love stats, I really like to take them apart to see what did what and what didn’t. I also love twitter.
Now, if you can put stats and twitter together then I’m drooling.
Here’s 6 ways I have found to track the links that I post on Twitter.
Getshorty is a beta script available that allows you to install your own personal tiny url service to your server. It allows you to use keywords as part of the url or let it automatically create one for you.
Site: Get-shorty
This is an excellent way to completely control how your links look and where they point to. It takes a little work and some template changes but combine it with some decent stats tracking and you will have a full service all to yourself!
More info: Business Mind Hacks
If you have Google Analytics on your page you can add some variables to the end of the your URL so google can store some extra information about the visitor.
Example:
http://www.you.com/?utm_campaign=promotion&utm_source=twitter&tm_medium=social
You will still need to use a URL shortener such as tinyurl or one of the others that don’t provide tracking services.
More info: Epikone
You can use tweetburner to shorten a url for you and track how it performs over time. The advantage of this is that the twurl.nl links are integrated into desktop programs such as twhirl and tweetdeck.
Site: Tweetburner
This is another URL shortening service with added support for link tracking. Their dashboard for tracking your links is quite extensive and a dream for stats geeks.
site: Budurl
This is my favourite URL shortener service. It’s integrated with tweetdeck and the stats page is very useful. You can even watch results in real time as people click your links. You can look at the stats on any bit.ly link by entering it into the search box or if you register and provide your twitter username, you can bring up all the bit.ly links you have used in your tweets and see how many clicks have happened over time.
Site: bit.ly
(you can see the results of this post being retweeted by @styletime on this link here)
You don’t have to have twitter to use these tools, they’ll work perfectly well for affiliate links and flyer links. I’d recommend going with the self hosted option if you post a lot of links on forums or other places where they stay a long time so you can be sure they wont expire or if you need to update where it points to.
Ok, there are some things that tick me off on Twitter. Not enough that I lose my temper and throw stuff but, enough that I can move my fingers in a typey typey way to tell you about it.
This is how I shrink filter the growing list of people I follow..
Take the above picture (please, take it and throw it away!). How is it these people have 4000+ followers with autoDM’s like this? do they work? oh god I hope not.
This is a thing I like about twitter. There’s no religious tweets in my stream, for the life of me I can’t see how 140 characters could get someone to join your god. The religious can tweet to each other all day long but how many people of a different god will continue to listen?
I know you must be on an interesting site or going through some great links but, slow down! by the time I have checked out the first link. The public timeline has evolved more messages and I lose the rest!
What’s the matter with you? will you hand over your twitter username and password to just any old whacko who promises you a squillion followers? take a second and think about it…
die die die.
I get it, I’m an adult and I swear so I understand when things need an expletive or two but not when it’s every second f***ing word!
Hey! I has got url, an I has got twitter. I can add thems up and gets traffic!
fewls
it’s you’re funny not, your funny.
my funny what?
What gets your goat on twitter?
AutoDM is a method of sending a new twitter follower a direct message as soon as they follow you, usually along the lines of “hi, thanks for following me. check out my site/product/ebook/software” (delete as appropriate). You usually have to give your username and password to a 3rd party site so they can monitor your follower list and send out your message when a new one gets added.
As you can probably guess, I am not a fan! To me, using a bot to send a direct message is the height (or low) of insincerity. If someone wants to pitch me their product (and yes, giving away something you wrote is a pitch) then wouldn’t it be polite to actually message me first? Why get a bot to do it for you, sure it’s easy and it never forgets but would you send a robot with a card about your gift shop to every new person that sends you a Christmas card? I wouldn’t but, I don’t get Christmas cards (…long story!)
Now, most people get an email when they receive a DM. If I got an email from someone I don’t really know asking me to visit their site or download their ebook or buy their home made fluffy balls (really!) then I would consider it spam. It’s unsolicited, it’s sent to mass numbers of people, it benefits the sender and the receiver didn’t ask or qualify themselves to read/use/buy/play with it!
Here are some examples of what I consider to be an autoDM spam..
I used to do a straight unfollow for these but recently I have been replying with my own DM asking why they think an autoDM is a good idea when so many people say it isn’t. I have yet to receive a reply, except, from @CoachDeb.
She (her bot) sent this..
I may have been a teensy weensy bit annoyed or perhaps feeling too big for my boots because I had just pipped over 1000 followers a little earlier so I replied with ..
.. in the public timeline (for shame!) and gawd bless her, she responded less violently than I think I would have if someone had ‘forshame’d me on their public timeline…
Suffice to say, no-one thanked me 
Fair play to her though, she’s got over 11,000 followers and she coulda moidered me with her army of loyal fans!
I think I can see that those that use autoDM think it’s a great feature and tool to use but those that don’t use them, think they’re spam and not needed. Horses for courses!
I don’t hate ALL dm’s, just those that, before even a “hello, how are you”, are sent by a robot without the knowledge of the person being followed. Look at this one from @lorelleonwp, it’s the kind of DM I can receive all day long! it makes me want to visit their profile and see their bio description and what their site is like..
Isn’t that a MUCH nicer DM to receive? I got it part way through writing this post and it restored my faith in twitter and the people that use it again.
The problem for me though is, there are so many people that have a massive following that are using these tools and all their new followers think it’s perfectly acceptable to do it themselves and so the fad continues. It reminds me of MLM marketers who say, “the LIST is EVERYTHING”. They send a gazillion emails out multiple times a week (sometimes multiple times a day) and any network marketer that’s just starting in the biz, thinks that’s what they should do too.
It becomes more about building a list for how much they can make and nought about how much they can help. I think the worth of a follower reduces to zero if all you want is more of them. What for? is it a secret way to riches? does having a gazillion followers make you right?
What do you think? is giving something away for free a pitch? (like CoachDeb’s twitterhandbook) or do you need a bit of gentle tweetplay (like foreplay but with a blue bird watching) before you’ll follow any links or download any software?
I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on using bots to build your twitter following or send messages that you can’t/don’t want to make yourself..I could be completely wrong and alone in my opinion. Let me know!
haha, I saw something quite cool and possibly scary today.
One of the people I follow had a tiny url with message “don’t click” so, of course, I clicked it and was presented with a blank page containing one button. Of course, I clicked that button too but nothing happened… until I saw people replying to me saying “no I didn’t” , turns out that when I clicked the button, I was actually sending the link to my own public timeline!! how? well, some french guy made a post about how to automatically send a tweet acting as the person who clicks a button by using an iframe and some simple css. I don’t know if he was the first twitter jacker but I’m sure he wont be the last!
It’s something that is spreading around twitter. As I type this, “Don’t Click” is a trending topic on twitter search…
The click of the button labeled “don’t click this” was actually the button of Twitter’s home page. You can’t see the rest of the page but when you click (well, most people would!), you are actually clicking on the update button for twitter.
The message is added by urlencoding a message on to the end of the twitter home page, thusly;
http://twitter.com/home?status=
and the urlencoded (changes spaces and other special characters to their hex equivalent) goes after…
I+luv+the+commentluv+plugin%21
As long as you’re logged in to twitter, clicking this link will show a message of my choosing in your own update field. If I used html to insert an iframe into a page with a button I made. All I would have to do is set the opacity of the iframe to 0 and position it so the update button is (invisibly) over the button I put on the page. (don’t worry, I didn’t do any shenanigans with the link above).
I did a quick bash up of some html (lol, no javascript needed) to see if I could do it and, well, it’s a piece of piss really. I decided not to show it to you as a working example because I am pretty sure that the Twitter T.o.S. doesn’t like anything to do with posting on someones behalf by misleading them. (impersonation violation?)
You can read some ways to prevent this from being used against you on this rather fine post.
Another way to detect it, is to have a script that faintly outlines any iframes on the page so you can see if there’s a doin’s goin’ on! I think I smell tomorrow’s project!
(either that or petition Twitter to have frame breaking script on any page that a user has text input and update buttons on).
The beta plugin I made just to see if I could (after @styletime sent me a tweet) has been quite popular, even more so since it got mentioned at Mashable so, I have updated the beta version of WP-Twitip-ID to final version 1.0 which takes care of some issues and makes it much better.
It no longer user custom post fields to store the users’ twitter ID, instead, it uses a new table in the database so a user only has to enter their twitter id once in a comment and all their other comments will show their ID (provided they use the same email address).
I’ve also added a new option to the plugin call to output the most popular way of displaying in the comments. The new command is “auto” and outputs as “Twitter: @commentluv” the username part is a link that opens in a new window and is nofollow. The whole thing is wrapped in a class of “twitter_id” so you can adjust the size of the text and link if you want.
See the plugin page here
http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/wp-twitip-id-plugin-add-a-twitter-field-to-your-comment-form-easily/
I wouldn’t have been able to get this done today if it wasn’t for @clearskynet who was able to answer my question about adding a table to the database. OMG I luv twitter!
also thanks go to @Mobasoft for the weird problem of using str_replace with a POST string containing @
for the geeks,
the twitter id gets posted from the comment form and gets collected by the plugin with $twitter=$_POST['atf_twitter_id'];
I wanted to remove any @ symbol so I used
$twitter_id=str_replace(“@”,”",$twitter);
but for some reason, the @ wouldn’t get removed. It was driving me crazy! I tried all sorts of urlencode, char(64) and so on but no joy. In the end, I got it to work by using str_replace with arrays instead. Now it’s
$search=array(“@”,”http://twitter.com/”);
$replace=array(“”,”");
$twitter_id = str_replace($search,$replace,$twitter);
and that worked! I don’t know why it wouldn’t work with “@” on it’s own. How strange!
Anyway, all is working now and I’m happy with it. You can download it at the plugin page here
http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/wp-twitip-id-plugin-add-a-twitter-field-to-your-comment-form-easily/
The title of this post is the question I asked myself many times.. before I used it myself that is.
For the first months of Twitter being talked about I deliberately kept away from it thinking that ‘micro-blogging’ was a complete waste of time. Who the hell would want to know if I’m going for a coffee or what page I’m interested in at the moment?.. turns out, quite a lot of people do actually.
I’ve been using Twitter through an application called Tweedeck for a couple of months now and I’ve really grown used to it taking up almost all of my second monitor space. I’ve discovered many reasons to use Twitter and I thought I’d share my thoughts on twitter here;
I hate IM programs, msn, yahoo, gtalk and all the rest because they just suck time away from you while you wait for someone to respond. I’m a fast typist so it’s painful to wait 3 minutes watching the “soandso is typing..” only to get a “yeah, I know!” in the message window.
They’re distracting too, I hate having a “tiddly-dum” noise happening all the bleedin time while I’m trying to watch something. Even though I’m committed to the tv at the time, a “tiddly-dum” will cause me to come to the computer to see what it was. 9 times out of 10 it could have waited but like brown on finger, it had to be investigated.
I’ve switched off all my IM stuff now and my productivity has massively increased! That’s why I like twitter, it’s like a thought catcher. It allows you to put up in less than 140 characters what’s on your mind without needing an immediate response.
If someone asks me a question via Twitter, it doesn’t make a flashing button on the taskbar appear demanding immediate attention. Instead, I can see it when the tweetdeck window gets the focus on my many many windows open.
You can download tweetdeck here, I really recommend using it. This is what my screen with twitter window looks like.
I use 3 columns. One for replies, one for the whole tweet stream and one for direct messages.
I donated some money to an organisation that wants to build a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. It was set up by http://tweetsgiving.org during the thanksgiving run up in America. The whole point was to raise 10,000 dollars in 48 hours by using twitter to promote it.
It was an amazing idea and executed wonderfully, people were retweeting messages about it all through the 2 days and before the time was up, 10 grand was raised just from the kindness of tweeters.
I have seen very little spamming going on with it which is such a change for a 2.0 web thingy. Usually the first thing any popular company does is switch on the money making adverts or get bombarded with cialis (ab)users.
There are a couple of advertising options open to twitter users but not by twitter itself. Magpie is one of them, I used it myself recently to promote some ebay listings using keywords like ipod and ebay. It generated a lot of click thrus and coincidence or not, I sold out of everything I advertised. Just before Christmas too! woohoo
I really like this part of it, it’s not like other places where you have to join someone and jump through some hoops to be part of their group. You can just click their follow link and get their tweets in your stream of all tweets. If you think they self promote too much, just unfollow and they’re gone!
You get to see what people are like a lot easier than by reading their blog, just 140 characters forces the person to not over-edit or revise their text.
From this you can see who you want to deal with and not be bowled over by a slick sales page or well crafted and heavily edited authority article. Straight to the brain is the game. I love it.
Just seeing a stream of tweets going by you can quickly pick up a repeated phrase, when the Mumbai attacks happened I knew about it before Sky news that was on in the background!
Shopper gets trampled on Black Friday sales in Walmart? I heard it on twitter first.
It really is a way to get a pulse on the world and especially useful if you’re a prolific blogger who’s hungry for news to post. If you’re early on breaking news or big things to happen then you’re on to a stumbleupon golden egg page.
This is fast becoming one of my favourite things about twitter. The ability to throw a question out there and have it answered within a few minutes or see it get retweeted (re-broadcasting the question to ones own network of followers) is just amazing.
My partner wanted to know how to attach a zipper to a home made woolen cardigan. I had no idea but I thought someone out there in the twitterverse (you’ll get used to these twitterisms) might know or at least, know someone who would know.
One of my followers saw the question and broadcasted it to her own network, within a couple of minutes I had a message with a link to a picture of exactly what to do. That’s the first time my pc has got some praise from ‘her indoors’
Ok shameless self promotion here but you can take advantage of the wp-twitip-id plugin which allows you to add a twitter username field to your comment form on your wordpress blog and display a “follow me” link or image next to the comment authors name.
Another reason for people to leave good comments on your site!
You can download wp-twitip-id plugin here
API or Applications Programming Interface is how so many cool widgets and gadgets get made by the geeky. It’s a way for developers to interact with the twitter server and pull loads of interesting information about the twitterverse.
There will be more and more applications coming out for twitter in the near future, there are already some incredible 2.0 web applications that give a sneak peak of what the internet of the ’10s will be.
Follow me on twitter if you haven’t already and get up to the second updates on my plugins and offers
Follow Me@commentluv
279 | Unique Today |
