Hi! My name is Nils, welcome to my personal website. Here is what you will find within this domain:
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Twitter on Citysearch.com
With the new Twitter integration on citysearch.com you can have a conversation directly with local business owners, for example: Solyn Studio
Citysearch is not a social network, so that conversation is not held captive on our site. The dialogue appears simultaneously on Citysearch and Twitter.
Room For Improvement
There are a few aspects of the integration which could be improved, beyond some minor layout refinements.
If you are signed into Citysearch, you have the option of linking your accounts. Currently this OAuth happens on the back-end after visitors enter their Twitter credentials into the site. This preserves the nicely integrated Ajax experience, but is a bad security design pattern. Hopefully we can switch to using RPX and use their OAuth workflow.
Another part that should be improved shortly is the way we load the tweets. We are relying on the Twitter search API to pull any tweet from, to, or mentioning the business. But in addition to stability issues, the search API has trouble pulling older tweets. It is also very aggressive about blocking "spam", which is what the posts of many businesses appears to be.
Update
I had under-estimated the lazyness of our Java developers (a foolish move, to be sure). The search API is only supposed to return the last 7-10 days posts, so it is not the correct API to be using for our integration.
New Twitter Account Signup
I don't know how many sites have been white-listed for this new feature*, but one cool thing you can do is sign up for a new Twitter account directly on Citysearch. Once a business owner has claimed their business (a new free feature) they may enter their Facebook fan page and Twitter account information. But if they don't have a Twitter account, or haven't even heard of Twitter, we offer the ability to sign up for a Twitter account using Citysearch.
We also suggest a Twitter handle for the business owner, if the most logical handle has not already been taken.
Our hope is that this new integration will benefit all parties. Business owners will be able to communicate directly with clients. Twitter will get exposure to a new audience of small business owners (and maybe one day find a business model?!). And Citysearch will facilitate the connection.
*Update
We were the first site to launch the new twitter sign up feature.
posted by Nils Devine # 10:31 PM 0 Comments
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