httpwebwitch - 8:11 pm on Nov 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm employing the Twitter API on two of my most prominent sites.

On one, I built a script that uses the Twitter API to broadcast significant events that happen in the app. For instance, when a new product is added to the marketplace, the system builds a grammatically-sensible phrase using a patern like "New item: [itemname] [itemURL]", and broadcasts that. These tweets are updates to the site's Twitter account, all in one place. So in that way I'm using Twitter a lot like RSS is intended to be used.

On another site, I allow users to "hook up" my app to their own twitter account, so significant things they do are similarly broadcast to their own profiles. This has far more wide-reaching publicity potential.

This complements similar automated broadcasts that go out to the Facebook API, to the site's RSS feed, and to a small list of opt-in email subscribers.

The return from this is actually negligible. But I have noticed that my automated tweets have shown up as backlinks all over the web, where people are republishing real-time Twitter feeds. That can't be a bad thing.