Social Media

Implement Twitter Connect with Twit Connect

By Oscar in Film/TV/Music/IT 18 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Sign in with Twitter - Twitter Connect button

Implement Twitter Connect, check. This is somewhat old news as Twitter Connect or “Sign in with Twitter” has been out for quite some time via the Twitter API. For some reason it has been slightly quiet about it, not your regular boom-blast and video tutorials that we saw with the Facebook Connect release. It’s understandable though, as Facebook handles a significant higher portion of (personal) data.

I tried the Twit Connect plugin for WordPress to do my implementation. I believe it’s the first of its kind, at least for WordPress, created by Shannon Whitley. He has also written a short tutorial on how you go about implementing Twit Connect on your WordPress site. Sebastien Couture wrote another one on the same topic.

Getting it to work properly is really easy and straight forward. All you need to do is register an application with Twitter to obtain your consumer key and consumer secret. You’ll need this for the plugin settings later. Once you’ve entered all necessary information on the settings page for Twit Connect, you’re good to go. How’s that for out-of-the-box? Oh, if you get a “Can’t open secret file” when you try to save your settings it’s because of the file permissions of the files in your twitconnect folder.

The only negative feedback I have is that it seems to be ‘early beta’ for Twit Connect. It works as intended, sure – but it’s quite messy if you want to modify it in any way. I’m no whizkid when it comes to CSS, and as it’s all integrated in the twitconnect.php – it makes it a bit of a hassle. I’d prefer a separate CSS for the next release! I also wonder if it would be possible to have a Twitter user’s comment tweeted out on Twitter? Similar to wall posting via FB-connect. That’d be neat too.

Anyway, you’ll notice the ‘Sign in with Twitter’-button right below the FB-connect dito in posts now. You can use both to sign in and make comments without entering your details. Try it out!

187 goes Twitter

By Oscar in DMT, Film/TV/Music/IT, Friends No Comments Tags: , ,

Over the last few days I’ve increased my Twitter activity, it’s mainly because the normal early adopters of DMT (we’re all late adopters really), namely the 187 circle have found their way there. Joel, Rick and ‘even’ Missy Kumlin have all joined in. So far, Joel’s the only one with any activity, but I’m sure others will follow.

Makes it worth even having an activity to see what’s going on in everyday life, so keep it up! It’s extra special that we’re now so spread out; covering Sweden, Ireland and Australia. In about four months, we’ll all meet up on a boat somewhere in the Swedish archipelago.

Social Media Networking/Marketing

By Oscar in Business, Film/TV/Music/IT No Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

Talk about an explosion, it seems that Social Media Networking is still very much alive and hyped to the roof (the growth rate was estimated at +400% for 2007). But now, the first real battle has to be won. With growing criticism the last few couple of months towards how Social Media affects a brand – it will be interesting to see if some of the giants are forced out of the market because companies will start to re-evaluate their participation in Social Media Marketing, or if simply a lot of the Social Media sites (as in Social Web Applications) will start to focus more on what consumers write instead of businesses or newspapers. Of course, most of them are generated by user content, but a lot of the primary sources, such as a newspaper/magazine post is more often from a more trustworthy source than from someone like me – a wannabe blog journalist.

Of course, there are already a few sites that focus more on the U2U or C2C kind of aspect rather than the B2C side of things. But there still seem to be an overwhelming amount of Social Web Applications out there that doesn’t really provide a service which is needed. But again, who would have thought Facebook was “needed”?

I’ve recently tried out Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter and I’d have to say that StumbleUpon and Twitter are the only sites that I found somewhat cool and useful. It’s a great way to find new sites and resources that might be of interest to you, as well as get real-time news and updates of course (Twitter). Digg might be half useful, but if you already use an RSS-reader it’s utterly overflow I suppose.

Who’s here to stay and who will have to go?

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