I have been playing around with Twitter tonight, trying to see how well this can integrate with Drupal. There is alot of buzz starting to brew about how Twitter can be used as a tool for advocacy, political campaigning, and possibly even fundraising. I was personally looking for an easy way to do some micro-blogging from the road. To be completely honest, I am not a huge blogger (as you can see from the frequency of my posts), because it requires me to take time out of my busy days to sit down and formulate coherent thoughts into posts like this one (ugh).

I recently became a Twitter addict through Facebook. I would frequently update my Facebook status with random thoughts and funny run-ins throughout the day using Facebook Mobile. Since the release of the Twitter application, which allows you to have much more control over your status by eliminating the "Riche is...", I have been using Twitter to do microblogging...kind of. So, I was thinking, why not do this with my current blog so I can send short posts numerous times a day and not worry about having to have access to a computer. I love my Blackberry more anyway :-).

There are two experiments I am running:

1) Using the Twitter module for Drupal 5 (which powers this site)

2) Using the Twitter RSS feed subscription to aggregate updates to this site

Here are the test results:
1) Twitter Module

* This is a VERY basic module that only sends an update to Twitter everytime a new blog post is created. You can create the format you want your Twitter update to post in using the URL and Title tokens.
* From a online strategy perspective, this is a good way to promote a blog if you have many friends on various social networking sites. This will push out a message asking people to come back to your site to read about...something.
* Multi-user sites can have multiple people, each with their own blog, sending custom updates to their blogs.
* This may be a way great way for people on campaigns to use SMS as an outreach tool by asking supporters to subscribe to their "tweets" and sending updates out everytime a blog post is made. These blog post don't need to be post per say, as they can be short action alerts, appeals for donations, etc.

2) News Feed

* All this does is allow you to pull in your updates into a page or custom view. The limitation to this is that is you don't have much control offer aggregated "news", Drupal does not expose these as nodes (unless their is a module I am not aware of).
* I plan to use this as a way to send out my random thoughts in a block on the sidebar, just as a way to keep content somewhat fresh and updated.
* Organizations or campaigns could use this as a great way to keep people up to speed from the road. I personally am not always interested in reading long blog posts from candidates that on out in the field, it doesn't seem natural or organic. But, micro-blogging is a great way, coupled with other communication means (pictures I still personally feel trump video), formatted in a compelling way (VIEWS!!!), can make a world of difference to a user in their interaction with a candidate through the web.

All in all, this is not a bad start. My personal quest going forward will be to learn how to 1) expose aggregated news as nodes to incorporate the power of Views and Actions, 2) finding a module (or working on one in the future) that will allow your Twitter updates to post to your blog as nodes.