Use Twitter as your site's CMS and let NextDB do the heavy lifting

[ibec]

A NextDB use case for companies that don't have a dedicated
webmaster...

For the latest iteration of my site I wanted a (very, very) simple CMS
that also allows me to perform instant and ad-hoc updates on the
various sections. It turned out that "tweets" would be fine, where
hashtags are use to point a tweet to its proper destination on the
site (e.g. #headline, #tagline, #intention, #product, #service, #news,
#clip, etc). So I created a special Twitter account that is only used
to tweet the site.

Here it is:
- The site: bit.ly/infopractica
- The Twitter account: bit.ly/atinfopractica

Now where does NextDB fit in? Well, Twitter sometimes has latency
issues or even deals with complete outages (both planned and
unplanned). Plus, you never know how long (all) your tweets will be
available in its archive. That's where NextDB comes in, as a fast and
reliable data staging service for all the tweets. A background process
makes sure that all new tweets are archived into NextDB before they're
served to the site.

Would this approach make sense to other sites?

Enjoy! Ivo

[geoffrey hendrey]

Nice site. The radar concept is really interesting! I've added the site to our list http://www.nextdb.net/wiki/en/OnTheWeb and I see you have the NextDB.net logo on the site. awesome!

I don't fully understand how the twitter piece works. Can you explain the mechanics of how th tweet is received and where is causes a siet update? Lightweight CMS is a killer concept right now. I am working with a client who is using NextDB from within Joomla because they need super-easy-to-integrate product catalogs. "lighweight" is key.

-geoff

[ibec]

This poor-mans CMS value chain contains 3 steps:

[1] Just tweet, and use the special hashtags (with any Twitter client)
[2] Sync tweets with NextDB, using both the Twitter and NextDB REST
API (there's a special CMS sync page for this that can be loaded
manually or scheduled automatically)
[3] Visit the website, that queries the tweets from NextDB (the site
is fully server-side served via SSJS, powerd by Jaxer)

That's all folks.

To open this up for other users/sites as well, I could make a special
Twitter account from whom all followers' tweets are automatically
processed this way. And the page itself would than become visible on a
site like twittercms.com/<account>

-Ivo

[geoffrey hendrey]

I'm not that well educated on twitter, so I have one question. When you say "just tweet", does the action of tweeting somehow touch the URL with the special hash tags? Or does the Sync process visit the twitter page and scrape the URLs with the special hashtags?

-geoff

[MaldenJen]

This thread got me thinking not about "poor man's CMS," but about
reputation management and consistent messaging.

Are there already various apps that provide easy and useful archiving
and databasing of one's own Tweets, e.g., Tweetdeck? Are there similar
apps that allow you to archive/database other users' tweets?

From my experience in corporate marketing and product management, I'd
think that software that allowed a company to easily archive, index,
and otherwise keep tabs on official and/or unofficial "company
tweets" (or @ and # mentions) would be attractive...

~Jen

[Eric Dorman]

I am building an app with Google Waves Embed API and it seems to work
better than Twitters apis.

I had trouble getting Twitters apis to work and I don't why anyone
would want to create more apps with Twitters api.

Most of the apps that developers are thinking of building with
Twitters apis have already been developed.

That is why I use Google Wave now cause it such a new technology that
you can build new applications that no one has thought of yet.

This is just my opinion,but I just have always liked the way Google
documents things in their apis.

Thanks & God Bless,
Eric

[ibec]

@geoff

Thanks for exposing my query URL :( One reason I'm using SSJS / Jaxer
is that it hides all the backend kung-fu, table definitions and
credentials and allows me to only serve plain HTML to the client. If
you look at the page source, you only see plain HTML and some CSS. The
http://nextdb.net/nextdb/service/ URI instead of the http://nextdb.net/nextdb/rest/
doesn't throws a protection dialog at you.

And since I'm using Twitter - and its clients on all possible devices
- for all my news gathering and search actions (using Google is so
2008...), it's only a matter of a seamless experience for using tweets
to update my sites content. And the sync process uses to Twitter API
to gather the new tweets and stores them in a NextDB table. After
every sync cycle, it stores the latest "tweet signature" in NextDB as
well, so in the next sync process it knows the tweet request offset
(aka: since_id, http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-user_timeline
).

@jen

There are already several initiatives that build a social archive from
everything out there. One example is www.collecta.com and it has an
API as well! Here's a sample on using the Collecta archive and API for
"ranking the stars": http://bit.ly/actradarcollecta

But one major problem with these initiatives - besides very technology
focused - is that they don't provide any meta data or relevance
ranking yet; it's just one huge timeline thrown at you that requires
extensive cleaning and filtering to make sense out if it. Let alone
reputation management... For more promising efforts for online
reputation management, take a look at www.teezir.com and www.collectiveintellect.com

-Ivo

[ibec]

Here's a picture of the Tweet-a-Site Value Chain at-a-glance:
http://bit.ly/tweetasitevc

So the ingredients are:
- A special Twitter account that acts as your sites' CMS
- A webpage template to show the tweets (some sections show all the
tweets, some show a random one)
- Some cloud magic

cheers, Ivo