140Char

You may notice a new icon on every post. It comes from Dan Zarrella (@danzarella), who I continue to be hugely impressed by.

It started back in December when I spotted his interesting analysis of Retweeting, and I’ve followed his Tweetback project. But now he’s gone waaaaay further with the TweetSuite Plug-in for Wordpress.

It includes:

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

I’m using it here and on www.thewayoftheweb.net, and so far it’s been simple and easy to use, and has worked ‘out-of-the-box’.

Interestingly, there’s already an alternative to Tweetbacks – The Twittbacks Wordpress Plugin created for Smashing Magazine by Joost de Valk. (He’s also on Twitter as @jdevalk)

One outcome of the two plugins is an interesting post by Jonathan Bailey on whether reproducing Tweets could lead to copyright problems.

In the meantime, I’m using TweetSuite, and so far I can highly recommend it – the only suggestion that immediately sprang to mind is that the icon might be better placed at the footer of a post rather than top left or right, but that’s a minor point!

Now this is interesting, as I’m a firm believer that much of the power of Twitter comes from external applications – and that even monetising Twitter could be unlocked by the ways it can be used outside of the current website.

Chirrup is an application which allows you to utilise Twitter for your comments. Simply put, everyone can message you via Twitter, Chirrup fetches all the replies and sorts them by url (So you can have a different feed for each page), and you can then display it however you desire.

It’s slightly more complicated than just copying a widget – but no more than installing a Wordpress plugin. It also caches message locally, and goes through your personal replies rather than the public feed – helping speed. And funnily enough, it’s also available as a Chirrup Wordpress plugin. There’s a developer blog, here, for more.