Book a demo
Start for free

Servoy Makes Social Media Updates Easy

3 minutes read

In looking around at all the social media sites that are available today – a thought hit me: “How in the world would you update all that stuff?” Apparently, it occurred to someone else as well because I found a tool that makes updating multiple social media sites a lot easier: ping.fm.

This nifty site (still in beta – but just request a log in and in a couple of days they will give you one) – is basically an aggregation service that will allow you to input all your log ins for all the social media sites you’re a member of – and then blast your update to them in near real time.

It will also let you post to any single service by adding “@” and then a two letter abbreviation – e.g. Twitter = @tt. Not only will it allow you to do status updates and micro-blogging – but it will allow you to do full blog posts as well. To post a blog entry to blogger – you would use something like this: @bl This is Cool!^Body of my blog. Ping.fm would then post a new posting to your blogger account with title^posting.

I also ran across some very interesting other stuff when looking at the APIs of LinkedIn (still not public yet) and Twitter, as well as Pownce, Plurk, Rejaw and Tumblr.

For LinkedIn there is a webservice widget called “Company Insider” that you can call that will see if there is anyone you know in any company. It’s VERY easy to insert into any HTML page.

If you’re into Twitter – there is some great documentation on their RESTful API here. Basically, a RESTful API means you can call it with simple URLs. For example – enter this text into a browser (Firefox or IE work best): http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml. You will be prompted to enter your username/password (use your Twitter login and password) – and you’ll get back an XML string of the last 2 people that posted to you.

You can also get it back in atom, rss, or json formats as well – simply by changing the “xml” in the url to one of the supported formats.

It’s basically the same thing for Tumblr, Rejaw, Pownce, Plurk, etc. They all offer a RESTful API that you can get XML or JSON files out of. This means that you can add all of this social media to whatever site you have. In fact, if you develop applications – it’s conceivable to create a really cool social networking mashup/dashboard type of application.

You could, also create a Smart Client application that would allow all the updates – or include cool widgets like the LinkedIn Company Insider functionality next to a client listing in your Web Client applications. The possibilities are really endless – and Servoy makes it easy to integrate all of these type of content.

Servoy developers here a challenge: create an application (Web Client or Smart Client) that will interact with one or more sites. We’ll post it up for others to use as inspiration. You can contact me directly at bcusick AT servoy DOT com (put “Servoy Social Media” somewhere in the subject so it doesn’t get into my spam folder).

Share this article via

The end
Join 30k+ developers that stay on top of the latest low code insights!

customer cases

insights and reports

relevant news