simsbox.net blog

Integrating Twitter with blog comments

2008-09-01 20:02:36 perma-link : tiny-link

After finding that none of the existing solutions for ehancing comments with community features were very good, I got the idea to integrate Twitter with my blog comments.  After a few days of hacking with the API, my comment system now work like this:
  1. When I make a blog post, I tweet the url and title to my blog's twitter account (simsbox).
  2. Any replies to @simsbox are displayed on my blog page as comments.  I also get the commenter's name, avatar, and website from twitter.
  3. If someone wants to make a comment while on my blog page, they can enter their twitter login credentials and it will post the tweet for them.
  4. If they don't have a twitter account, then I post it from my blog's comment twitter account (simsbox_c) so it still enters the twitter world.
  5. If for some reason twitter is down, then the comment is still saved, it just doesn't get posted to twitter.
Why do all this?  Well, this adds quite a few features to my commenting system:
  • The commenter's url and avatar is pulled from twitter so they don't have to submit any of that info.
  • The commenter has a history of all their comments on twitter.
  • You can easily see all comments to my blog
  • I don't have to manage my own user account system.
  • By posting from their twitter account, the commenter proves their identity.
  • The commenter's twitter profile makes them more than just a name.
  • People can comment using one of the many twitter apps.
  • Most importantly, my blog hopefully gets spread across the twitterverse.
A feature I still have yet to add is the ability to reply directly to another comment.  So if user bob posts "@simsbox I think this is stupid", then I can reply directly to him "@bob why do you think it is stupid?".  He gets a direct reply to his status and his response back to me is captured on my comment page (replying to a specific status is only possible using the twitter API).  Of course, I am not going to try to follow the conversation once it leaves the simsbox or simsbox_c accounts (if joe replies to bob, I won't know about it unless he does it through my website).

I could even provide this as a service for other blogs.  Technically I don't even need to keep a local copy of the comments, the whole thing could be hosted on twitter by using some kind of id to signify what blog post the comment is for.  I focused on twitter, but I could also integrate comments with other services like google talk, ping.fm, or FriendFeed.  If I can work around Twitter's limitations, anything is possible, right?

So what do you think?  Someone make a comment! ;)

1 Comments

Daniel Sims
2008-09-15 13:53:12 perma-link
http://chirrup.angryamoeba.co.uk/ is a similar idea that finds comments by url.
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