Ok, this is pretty slick ... a friend of mine (Andy Matthews) tweeted something about an awesome social media experiment thrown together by Fast Company, so I just had to check it out and thought I should spread the word too. When you follow this link http://fcinf.com/v/dmqa, you'll be taken to the page that contains tons of photos (think facebook and twitter profile pics). When you click on one, you're given some brief info on that person such as their 'influence rank', bio (picked up from either facebook or twitter), etc. Then, if you click to see a person's 'influence' you're whisked off to another area to visually see the people they've 'influenced' to stop by. There's so much more, but you'll just have to see it for yourself.

In the end, you're given a link and the ability to either tweet or post on your facebook status something similar to this:

Fast Company is searching for 2010's Most Influential Person Online. You are more influential than you think. http://fcinf.com/v/dmqa.

In any event, it's a cool idea and thought others might like it too.

MySpace has announced users can now automatically sync their status updates with Twitter. Is having the ability to create a "Global Social Status" (yes, you can use that ... I just made it up) really such a good thing?

Not long ago I ran across an application in Facebook that would pull in my Twitter updates and automagically update my Facebook status. I quickly learned that this was not exactly the best idea in the world (and I'll tell you why in a moment), so I'm not so certain the efforts of MySpace are going to bring about any kind of improvements in the social media communities.

Let's think about this for a minute ... if you're a friend of mine on Facebook (or MySpace) AND you follow me on Twitter ... do you really want to read my status updates everywhere you go? For serious, does it make sense to "shotgun" your updates to every single social community you belong to? I think not.

Sure, there are rare occasions that you might want to do this ... but I say resist the temptation! I've found that for the most part, people I follow on Twitter are a completely different group of people than I have on Facebook. Sure, there is some overlap and that's to be expected, but the vast majority of people I know of Facebook (or MySpace) are people I've actually met, am friends with, family with, grew up with, you get the picture. Many of the people (and/or companies) I follow on Twitter are people I've never personally met (although many I hope to meet someday) but we share some commonalities ... maybe it's programming, maybe it's music, maybe it's geography. You know?

Where I'm going with this is that something I might "tweet" about may not necessarily be something I want to update my "Global Social Status" with. The audiences are completely different and often warrant their own unique message, even if the messages are very similar.

The flip side to this is if you like to Twitter ... and you know who you are ... you have the potential of overwhelming your family and friends with updates like "RT @stevewithington CF9 is the bees knees ... I have ORM, do you?" or "This site rocks: http://tinyurl.com/nv62na #muracms #mura #coldfusion #sql"

Heck, I don't know about you, but I already get a little irritated having to scroll through things like "Help Me on Mafia Wars" or the ever popular "Steve Withington took the 'What Kind of Car Are You?' quiz and got the result: You're a 1969 Bitchin' Camaro. Read more ..."

So if you're goal in life is to annoy the crap out of people in your social communities, then go right ahead and applaud the efforts of MySpace and others in their quest to become THE place to go to update your Global Social Status. In the mean time, I'll continue along, grumbling and complaining about silly things like this.

This is my first attempt at building a Mura CMS plugin, so as you can imagine, this is going to be pretty darn simple. This plugin was actually inspired by a blog post I wrote back in March 2009 about using ColdFusion's CFFeed to display twitter tweets. If you like it ... great! If not, sorry I disappointed you.

The plugin will allow you to display the most recent tweets on your site(s). No knowledge of ColdFusion or programming should be required! However, if you are comfortable with .css, etc.then you'll be happy to know the tweets are displayed within a div id of "twitterTweets" and the tweets themselves are output in an unordered list, so you can style to your heart's content.

If there are tweets available via the twitter search interface, then you should be able to see output. If not, or if the tweets are more than a few weeks old, then you will see a message stating that there are no tweets available.

Installation

1. Login to your Mura CMS admin
2. Go to "Site Settings" (upper-right on the yellow bar)
3. Select the "Plugins" tab
4. Browse to the location of the TwitterTweets.zip file (don't unzip the files! Mura will do this for you. Unless, of course, you want to poke around the code.)
5. Click "Deploy"
6. You need to enter you twitter username. For example, if you visit http://twitter.com/stevewithington, then "stevewithington" is your username.
7. Under "Site Assignment" be sure you select which site(s) you wish to apply this plugin to
8. Go to the "Site Manager" of the site you wish to display this on
9. Select a page to edit
10. Select the "Content Objects" tab
11. From the "Available Content Objects" dropdown, select "Plugins"
12. Then select "TwitterTweets" and choose which area to display on by clicking the ">>" button
13. Click "Publish"

Optional settings at this point are merely how many recent tweets to display and whether or not you want to show a title above the tweets.

Need help?

Catch me on the Mura CMS forums or contact me through my site.

Cheers!

Edit

I was asked about using more than one twitter username and how to handle the plugin for multiple sites. The answer is actually quite simple. All you would have to do is install and deploy TwitterTweets again. This would allow you to have multiple installs, each with their own username, etc. This also gives you control over which install goes to which site(s).

I am considering including the ability to have multiple usernames for one install though.

Any other suggestions?

As Twitter's popularity continues to increase, users and consumers of the information being broadcast are looking for quick and easy ways to integrate some of the information into their own content. So I whipped up this short, but sweet, example of how easy it is to repurpose content from Twitter using just a dash of ColdFusion.

First things first though, what makes consuming information from Twitter so easy is their search functionality. Check it out at http://search.twitter.com. By following the instructions there, you will see that anything you search for can be "burned" via RSS. After your search, following the link "Feed for this query" and viola! Instant RSS feed you can now consume. How sweet it is.

What's really cool is that if you search for let's say "stevewithington" you can see not only my posts, but also any responses too. If you only want to see tweets "from" me for example, then you simply put "from:" in front of your search criteria such as "from:stevewithington."

For sake of simplicity, I'm going to just follow the "Feed for this query" link and continue on.

If you're using ColdFusion 8, then all you have to do is use CFFeed to consume the feed. Here's a sample line of code:

If you're curious as to what the feed contains, you can always use CFDump to find out:

Using the above line of code, you should see something similar to the following:

As you'll see, CFFeed creates a very nice query object containing quite a bit of information for you. One field of interest at this point is the "CONTENT" field which contains HTML-formatted code for each tweet. If you prefer a "text-only" version of the tweet, then simply use the "TITLE" field. So, to show how easy this is, let's just loop over the feed items and output the "CONTENT."

Running the above line of code, you should see something like this:

I know, I know, you're probably thinking, "there's got to be more to it, right?" Well, there is if you want there to be! Using CFDump, you saw all kinds of information you can repurpose to your heart's desire. Think up new ways to use Twitter and with ColdFusion's CFFeed you can create new ways to consume it's easy-to-integrate-and-embed information.