Sending Tweets around Twitter is all very nice, very nice but eventually you want more range and that means asking how you send your Tweets outside of Twitter to Facebook, Google+, or other social networks.
Caution: moderately geeky
Updated: all of the article remains valid except for the Tutorialzine approach to fetching Tweets which will be handled differently and will be covered in a future article. I'm going through code right now to implement the feature and will document how it works ... if it works.
Twitter is an inevitable hub for multi-network communications because it's excellent for easily receiving information and also passing it along on request. For example, this blog automatically posts my Twitter account with a message title whenever I write an article. This idea of multi-network communications sounds spooky until you see it's only a method for facilitating my laziness. Anything which saves me any kind of labor or spares me geeky annoyance is defined as good.
The point of posting the article notification to Twitter is writing the article serves no purpose if no-one knows about it. Therefore, post it to Twitter where people can find out about it there.
We want everyone possible to know of the new article and preferably without requiring any labor.
Letting Facebook know is also automatic because it's relatively-easy to establish a linkage between Twitter and Facebook such that messages posted to Twitter are also echoed to Facebook. The mechanism is generally reliable but it's not exactly faster than a speeding locomotive.
Letting Google+ know is easy and automatic as well. However, it's a problem because the linkage is a proprietary mechanism within Google. That is, you identify your Google+ account to Blogger and it consequently notifies it when you write a blog article.
There is a gaping hole in the above because all Tweets go to Facebook whereas none of them will with Google+ and the latter is true because of Google and its endless posturing, pimping and posing. Facebook does lots of that in its own way but Google is closed to a ridiculous level. Face it. When you're even worse than Facebook, you have definitely hit rock-bottom.
Note:
This segment remains for the sake of completeness. This technique will not be used.
The possible solution to the gaping hole is a PHP application to fetch current Tweets or whatever you like from your Twitter account and then do whatever your devious mind likes with them. A method for doing this is described by Martin Angelov on Tutorialzine: Display your Favorite Tweets using PHP and jQuery (Updated)
Note: there's a fair amount of HTML, CSS, and PHP in the article. If you're comfortable with these markup and scripting languages, it shouldn't be much of a problem. If you are not comfortable with them, it would be a better idea to start out with a less difficult application for your first example.
End of Note.
As to requiring a similar type of application to fetch content from Facebook, Google+ or other, it's not likely because the largest content in any of them is chat which has an exceptionally short shelf life. Facebook is trying to push itself off as the new YouTube because of the number of videos loaded there. It's true they get an astronomical number of plays but they are not high-content videos inasmuch as they're typically cat videos and other generally trivial types of amusements.
So, those types of networks are not typically sources but rather destinations. Twitter is the unusual one because it can serve as both and that's a radical difference between Twitter and the others. For my purposes, it makes Twitter exceptionally useful.
Caution: moderately geeky
Updated: all of the article remains valid except for the Tutorialzine approach to fetching Tweets which will be handled differently and will be covered in a future article. I'm going through code right now to implement the feature and will document how it works ... if it works.
Twitter is an inevitable hub for multi-network communications because it's excellent for easily receiving information and also passing it along on request. For example, this blog automatically posts my Twitter account with a message title whenever I write an article. This idea of multi-network communications sounds spooky until you see it's only a method for facilitating my laziness. Anything which saves me any kind of labor or spares me geeky annoyance is defined as good.
The point of posting the article notification to Twitter is writing the article serves no purpose if no-one knows about it. Therefore, post it to Twitter where people can find out about it there.
We want everyone possible to know of the new article and preferably without requiring any labor.
Letting Facebook know is also automatic because it's relatively-easy to establish a linkage between Twitter and Facebook such that messages posted to Twitter are also echoed to Facebook. The mechanism is generally reliable but it's not exactly faster than a speeding locomotive.
Letting Google+ know is easy and automatic as well. However, it's a problem because the linkage is a proprietary mechanism within Google. That is, you identify your Google+ account to Blogger and it consequently notifies it when you write a blog article.
There is a gaping hole in the above because all Tweets go to Facebook whereas none of them will with Google+ and the latter is true because of Google and its endless posturing, pimping and posing. Facebook does lots of that in its own way but Google is closed to a ridiculous level. Face it. When you're even worse than Facebook, you have definitely hit rock-bottom.
Note:
This segment remains for the sake of completeness. This technique will not be used.
The possible solution to the gaping hole is a PHP application to fetch current Tweets or whatever you like from your Twitter account and then do whatever your devious mind likes with them. A method for doing this is described by Martin Angelov on Tutorialzine: Display your Favorite Tweets using PHP and jQuery (Updated)
Note: there's a fair amount of HTML, CSS, and PHP in the article. If you're comfortable with these markup and scripting languages, it shouldn't be much of a problem. If you are not comfortable with them, it would be a better idea to start out with a less difficult application for your first example.
End of Note.
As to requiring a similar type of application to fetch content from Facebook, Google+ or other, it's not likely because the largest content in any of them is chat which has an exceptionally short shelf life. Facebook is trying to push itself off as the new YouTube because of the number of videos loaded there. It's true they get an astronomical number of plays but they are not high-content videos inasmuch as they're typically cat videos and other generally trivial types of amusements.
So, those types of networks are not typically sources but rather destinations. Twitter is the unusual one because it can serve as both and that's a radical difference between Twitter and the others. For my purposes, it makes Twitter exceptionally useful.
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