Hi,
I am new to this, but I am an artist planning an interactive exhibition. I am wondering how I might go about creating a live twitter feed where viewers at the one-night only exhibition can text to the feed from their phones, similar to something like http://www.streamtwitter.com/. For those who don't have internet-accessible phones, I want them to be able to text to the feed as well. It would be interesting if I could also somehow design the appearance of the feed. If I could get around paying for this that would be great.
Thoughts?
Ty,
Sofia
Replies
I think it's a bit easier to think of this as two separate parts - posting tweets, and showing tweets.
To show tweets, you'll need to pick a way to isolate a stream of tweets and get updates to that stream when new tweets are added. Since it doesn't sound like you'll be following the folks in the exhibition, or adding them to a Twitter list, you'll need to tell your attendees to Tweet in a specific way, such as @mentioning your username, or tweeting with a specific #hashtag.
To render a list of tweets containing a hashtag or mention, there are many options. The easiest, yet least flexible, would be to use a search widget:
https://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_search
If you're more technically inclined, you could use the Search API to render the Tweets any way you want: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/using-search
The Streaming API would give you realtime updates for a tracked keyword, but would be the most difficult to integrate, technically: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods
Finally, like you mentioned, there are plenty of third party products which will allow you to render a list of tweets with a specific keyword, hashtag, or mention.
Using this kind of setup, you actually do not need to do anything at all to let folks post to the feed - any Twitter client should be capable of performing the appropriate @mention or #hashtag reference, including SMS. As a convenience, you may consider creating a link to a Web Intent prefilled with the appropriate content and posting that on a site accessible to attendees. The documentation for Web Intents is located here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/intents
Yes, but I'd like this to be available even if they don't have a twitter account - essentially, I'm imagining people being able to anonymously post, from their phones, to a twitter feed. Is that possible? I'm remembering concerts I've been to where you could get your name on a jumbotron by sending a text to a certain number...
I see. That kind of integration would be a lot more painful. You would need to use some sort of service which would notify your server upon incoming SMS messages (like http://www.twilio.com/api/sms for example). The server would have credentials to post to a shared twitter account. Upon receiving a message, the server would post from that account.