Introducing Twitter support
Our goal with IMified is to allow you to write one application and have it work over any text-based channel. Be that public IM networks, private XMPP networks, or now Twitter.
If you have an existing IM bot, you can now connect a Twitter id to it. You don’t need to write any special code, deal with Twitter API rate limits, or do anything new with Twitter. Things will just work. Simply log into your account, select your application, and activate Twitter.
After you connect Twitter to your app, we’ll start sending you all the direct messages and mentions (aka @ replies) that it gets. Your app responds to those just like any other incoming instant message and we send your response back to the other person. If they sent you a DM, we’ll respond via DM. If the message was a mention, we’ll reply in kind. You can also push messages to Twitter users, sending them an @ reply or a direct message.
You might want to handle some formatting differently in Twitter than you do in your IM messages. To help you with that, we tell you if the message is coming from Twitter, AIM, or another network.
Want to try it out? We’ve got a demo set up called Gridlock. Send your location to gridlock@bot.im on Jabber or gridlockbot on AIM, Yahoo, or Twitter. The application will reply with any known traffic incidents that are reported by the Yahoo Traffic API.
To help you get started with building your own Twitter and IM applications, we’ve published the PHP source code for Gridlock. We’ve updated our API documentation to include information about Twitter.
And if you’re a user of Twitter, follow us at @imified and @voxeo.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:01 am
[...] IMified » Blog Archive » Introducing Twitter support – That is very cool. I should reactive my IMIfied account and play with it. [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 10:37 am
[...] For example, if you were a Twitter user in its earlier days, every time you wanted to use another application or web service with your Twitter account, you had to give that app or service your Twitter user ID and password. There’s a security issue here in that you are entrusting your credentials to some other company or application – and trusting that they won’t share those credentials. There’s also a configuration issue in that if you change your password you then have to go to all the other services and provide the updated info. Now, with OAuth support in Twitter, when you want to add a new service to interact with your Twitter account, you are prompted to login to your Twitter account and authorize or deny the access for the new service. The key point is that the new service or application never gets your Twitter credentials. (And as another example, OAuth is what our IMified service uses to allow an automated bot to interact with your Twitter account.) [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 11:36 am
[...] For example, if you were a Twitter user in its earlier days, every time you wanted to use another application or web service with your Twitter account, you had to give that app or service your Twitter user ID and password. There’s a security issue here in that you are entrusting your credentials to some other company or application – and trusting that they won’t share those credentials. There’s also a configuration issue in that if you change your password you then have to go to all the other services and provide the updated info. Now, with OAuth support in Twitter, when you want to add a new service to interact with your Twitter account, you are prompted to login to your Twitter account and authorize or deny the access for the new service. The key point is that the new service or application never gets your Twitter credentials. (And as another example, OAuth is what our IMified service uses to allow an automated bot to interact with your Twitter account.) [...]
April 13th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
[...] For example, if you were a Twitter user in its earlier days, every time you wanted to use another application or web service with your Twitter account, you had to give that app or service your Twitter user ID and password. There’s a security issue here in that you are entrusting your credentials to some other company or application – and trusting that they won’t share those credentials. There’s also a configuration issue in that if you change your password you then have to go to all the other services and provide the updated info. Now, with OAuth support in Twitter, when you want to add a new service to interact with your Twitter account, you are prompted to login to your Twitter account and authorize or deny the access for the new service. The key point is that the new service or application never gets your Twitter credentials. (And as another example, OAuth is what our IMified service uses to allow an automated bot to interact with your Twitter account.) [...]