Okay, I have to admit that I have been pretty resistant to exploring twitter. In that I tend to be a solitary creature I honestly do not understand why anyone cares what I am eating, drinking or thinking during the course of an average day.
Apart from myself, my partners have been fervently investigating twitter over the last few months and have finally gotten my attention as they have debated how practical applications of the “micro-blog” can be realized in a profitable manner.
RSS & News Delivery
Following a brainstorming session the other day I began thinking about how I could take a single site and apply Twitter in a truly effective way. Over the past few months we have been developing a web site for a local University and are beginnning to place the finishing touches on it. As I worked in MODX utilizing the Ditto snippet to create an RSS page for the news section I wondered if there was a method for feeding RSS into Twitter. Well, of cours there is: twitterfeed. All I had to do was sign up for a twitter account, sign up for a twitterfeed account, go through a short configuration page and my news posts were now being fed onto a new twitter page.
I think the most obvious advantage to handling news posts in this way is derived from the ability to push time sensitive data to a user through a mobile device, ultimately, from a CMS. Since this is a University site I felt this was a particularly practical example since management of campus security considerations has become a priority issue for schools.
My Partners
So, here it is: YOU WERE RIGHT.
I will probably never twitter my concerns for world peace or global warming, but I will admit that there are definite practical implications for a “micro-blogging” service like twitter.
