Why build a "Tweet of Fame" ?

This is a little twitter/blog gadget we developed specifically for our own needs  because we couldn't find anything similar on the web. And we think it very useful. Twitter integration in blogs is nothing new, but as with all totally automated processes involving no human intervention, the added value of the feature is close to zero. If I want to read someone else's tweets, I follow him/her on twitter. I just never read tweets redirected to a blog. My eyes skip them.

Which specific quality makes a reviewer/editor/agent's work especially useful ? In our opinion, it's the separating of signal from noise. Scanning through hundred of submissions in order to spot the few which are of interest to him/her, and hopefully to his/her audience. In terms of information, simple redirection of a RSS feed never adds value to anything. It adds a new layer of redundancy to the ambient noise and provides your audience with one more opportunity to loose patience and leave your blog.

On the other hand, a lot of the information travelling through the twitter channels is worth reading. Each blog has its own ways of marketing its content. We are writing WebComics, and in our area, connecting personally with our readers is of essential importance. Every single day, we receive through twitter a few mentions about one aspect of our works, more often than not from people who liked it. A shame to let these tweets be lost in the twitter sink-hole.

A very useful twitter feature, though not much used, is the "Twitter Favorites". Every twitter user has the opportunity to bookmark any tweet he reads for later reference. If it were for bookmarking alone, this twitter feature would be redundant with many other bookmarking  systems (your browser's, Delicious, Google, and many others), which might explain its relative lack of popularity. When reading a linked tweet, more often than not, I bookmark the link, not the tweet. But let's think the other way round. What can I use Twitter favourites for ?

As a twitter user, all your tweets are available through a public RSS feed, reachable at this address :

https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/YourUserNameHere.rss 

This feed is unsorted, and contains a lot of noise. Twitter provides you with a second RSS feed, which displays your twitter favourites :

http://twitter.com/favorites/YourUserNameHere.rss

We personally chose to use the favourites feed to bookmark every positive mention of our works by a twitter user. Our first intention was to keep track of people who cared enough for our webcomics as to write us a kind word of recommendation. For later reference.

We then decided to display these tweets directly on our websites, with a widget. This serves two purposes :

• first : it's a list of short enthusiastic users reviews, which other passer-bys could want to read, hence the name "Tweet of Fame". It's very similar to a list of IMDB / Amazon Book reviews. Only shorter in content.

• Second it's a way of thanking back a reviewer by providing a direct link on our sites to his/her twitter profile page.

In short, it's the Web 2.0 / Social Media equivalent to a links section.

And most interesting is the easy maintenance of the whole thing. Just Fav a tweet, and some minutes later, it will have gone through the feed chain (ours uses Yahoo pipes + Google Feedburner + Google AJAX feed API), directly to your home page. You can really focus on the editorial process, as tweets roll in, without having to manually copy/paste them.

In the next (more technical) part of this article, we'll explain which tools we used to easily integrate this feature into our web sites. A Wordpress plugin developer should be able to implement this quite easily. If ever you do, please keep us informed as we'd really like to review it.

You can see our tweets of fame in action on the following blogs :
CucuC
Celtic Heroes
Making Of