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Integrate Relevant Tweets into Your Blog with TweetRemoteAugust 25th, 2008 at 5:34 pmSource:Mashable! MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks like Curbly. This happens through a series of users that take the time to share images of their space and tag items in these photos. Think of the Facebook image-tagging capability that allows you to outline additional details in a given photo, providing viewers more data to work with beyond the actual image itself. In fact, MicasaStyle likens its service to a Facebook for room interiors, and its photo-tagging feature is central to its overall service offerings. There’s a rather involved upload and tagging process that you go through in order to share images of your own space, layering in additional information like the budget of the room, what type of room you’re sharing, and descriptive tag words that will help others find your space. And since MicasaStyle is so apt to become like a Facebook for home owners, I’d actually love to see some image import options from existing photo albums across the Web, like Facebook and Flickr, so that this sharing process can be simplified a bit for users. One good thing about the tagging process on MicasaStyle is the fact that retailers you add to your shared space will be auto-completed by MicasaStyle, providing links to that retailer so others can visit their site. What’s missing from this particular portion of the sharing process is the ability to add in a retailer’s link on your own, so if a particular retailer isn’t in MicasaStyle’s database yet, there won’t be a link readily available for other users. Additionally, links created by MicasaStyle’s auto-completion feature redirect to the retailer’s main website, not the page with details on the particular object that’s been tagged. Having a bookmarking tool for MicasaStyle users could help with specific information-sharing on this end, but it would also veer away from the room-specific way in which personal taste is shared on MicasaStyle’s network. To this end, I’d say that the approach MicasaStyle is taking with this site is very niche, as it limits its users to share photos from their own homes, and relies on a pretty good memory for a home owner, based on price, retailer and retailer information for any given piece on their home. I know that many home owners do in fact remember most of the information about the pieces in their home, but converting all of that into a cohesive, heavily-tagged network for sharing inspiration is a time commitment for participating users, and MicasaStyle would do well to diversify the type of users it attracts as it moves forward.
Most Twitter and blog integration tools aggregate all tweets to a blog and post them exactly as they are, verbatim, which can produce less than desirable results. TweetRemote is a new open source way to integrate Twitter with blogging platforms that aims to give bloggers more control over this process. You can pick and choose which tweets to publish to your blog and how they will look. It accomplishes this by only posting relevant tweets and formats them in a blog-friendly format. How does it do that? TweetRemote is able to do this by recognizing hashtags in tweets such as #text, #link, and #image, then pulls those tweets into separate RSS-style feeds and then formats them accordingly. Thus, everything appears on your blog in a more aesthetically pleasing format. The other key ingredient is the use of an RSS aggregator of choice such as FeedWordPress. Here’s the full installation documentation. At what cost? There might be a small price to pay for this benefit. In order to make your blog prettier it requires making your twitter stream a little uglier. For example, if you wanted to send a nicely formatted hyperlink to your blog via twitter with TweetRemote then you would have to send the following tweet: #link http://tweetremote.com Cool new twitter/blog integration tool! While the end result will look good on your blog, you might lose some followers on twitter because of what some call Tweet stream pollution. Quite simply, there are many people on Twitter that just don’t like hashtags and the way they look. So, it’s your decision if it’s worth potentially losing a few followers or not. Conclusion TweetRemote is intended only for bloggers that host their own blogs because it requires uploading files and some manual configuration. That means bloggers on free services like Worldpress.com and Blogger are out of luck at this point in time. Still, even if TweetRemote doesn’t accomplish this in the easiest manner, it has developed a better mousetrap for this process. Ultimately, that’s a good sign for things to come for anyone that wants to integrate Twitter with their blog.
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