XceptN’s IT Blog

The awesome micro-blogging system twitter is the new viral in the social media networking and the online marketing area. There are a lot of key parameters in the twitter area. Some are:

• Updates (Content)
• Friends
• Followers

Starting with the considered-to-be-most-valuable “Followers”, where crucial keys are:

• Making more and more followers
• Keep your followers  🙂

There are hundreds of ways to gain followers like reading  Twitter Power by Joel Comm, joining organizations like http://ifollowback.com by Jerell Klaver etc. But I strongly believe that the most crucial concept is the Content.

Finding “Friends” is much more easy. You may go to Twitter Search and look for tweets that interest you and you follow the tweeps doing them. But that is just “finding” part of it. “Making” friends requires a lot more. And one of those requirements is still the “Content”.

There are hundreds of different tools on the web to “automate” twitter. That is about automatic replies, direct messages (I do not like auto-DMs at all), scheduled tweets. Some examples:

• TweetLater
• FriendOrFollow
• TwitApps
• etc.

I have been / and am using some of them but I realized that an intelligent and most-appropriate solution lies in the Do It Yourself (DIY) arena.

I am using a Linux desktop / laptop day-to-day work. So the information below are all done on Linux environments. I am also using the python scripting language to develop software to be used with twitter (or to use the Twitter API for that matter).

I am using the python-twitter library along with the simplejson library for text encoding. For setting up your environment do the following:

Then you are ready so start coding. YES!. Below is a simple sample “Hello World” post to twitter:

import twitter

twapi = twitter.Api(username=’user’, password=’pass’)
twapi.PostUpdate(‘Hello twitterverse. See \
                  http://it.xceptn.com for more’)

Here you are.. With more Python skills you can develop your own application “for free” 🙂