As many of you already know, I’m big into developing data mining applications. One of my favorite sources for gathering data is of course Twitter. Even though I write a lot of commercial applications for data mining (and even sales & marketing), most of my data mining applications are for myself only. I like seeing what kinds of information I can find in different data sets. But, what if there was a way to get potential sales information out of something such as Twitter? Would you pay for a program that could watch Twitter and report back to you any tweets where someone was looking for something in particular? More importantly, would you pay for a program that could watch Twitter and report back tweets that contained information on something you could sell the tweeter? If the price was right and the tool could actually make your money back for you, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind throwing down a few bucks for it. So, would you be willing to send me a few bucks if I was to share with you the source code for creating such a product? Well, to the right of this article, there is a PayPal donate button and just below this paragraph is the source code showing you how to get started creating an app like I just mentioned.
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A few days ago, I was talking with a buddy of mine about social networking. We were kicking around ideas for new projects that could create passive revenues from the massive amounts of users and content that the social networking sites have to offer. Although I can’t go into much detail about what was discussed, I can share with you a couple of things I shared with my friend: more directly, Twitter. Most of the things I’m going to mention here are things that pretty much all internet marketers already know. But, I’m going to list them here anyways for those of you who don’t spend your time behind your computer.
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Since the New Year is finally here, I want to start things off right by sharing a small program I use very often. It’s called “TwitterSearch”. The version I am attaching is a simple console application that allows you to type in anything you want and it will search Twitter, returning the 15 most recent messages that contain the keywords you searched for. It’s just like using http://search.twitter.com, but this does it from your desktop instead of from your browser. To stop the program, just type “exit” without the quotes and press “Enter”.
I’m attaching the program and source code in its most basic form. I can’t remember where I found the code originally, so I can’t give credit to its original author. Plus, I don’t personally use the application the way I’m attaching it here for download. Instead, I include the code as a function with a few modifications in many of my other programs such as some of my marketing & research tools. For instance, I just finished writing a program for a client that runs on auto-pilot searching for specific keywords and search phrases. When matches are found, the program will automagically send a tweet to the user accounts that tweeted the original messages. The auto-tweets include information about products and / or services that relate to the keywords that were found in the original message.
The code is written in C# and was built using Visual Studio 2010. But, older versions of Visual Studio will work just fine as well.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using System.ServiceModel.Syndication;
using System.Xml;
namespace TwitterSearch
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.Write("twitter -> ");
string input = Console.ReadLine();
while (!input.ToLower().Equals("exit"))
{
string scrubbed = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(input);
var reader = XmlReader.Create(string.Format("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q={0}", scrubbed));
var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);
foreach (SyndicationItem item in feed.Items)
{
Console.WriteLine("t{0} - {1}", item.Authors[0].Name, item.Title.Text);
}
Console.Write("ntwitter -> ");
input = Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
}
You can download the source code and binary here. The executable is located in the folder “TwitterSearch > bin > Release”. Just double click the TwitterSearch.exe to run it.
Source Code: Download – 30KB
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A while back, I wrote a couple of articles (part 1, part 2) teaching you how to make money with Twitter. The biggest key in making money with Twitter is having a lot of followers. As mentioned before, there are plenty of ways you can increase your follower count and I now want to share with you another way. Just like the other methods I’ve mentioned for getting more Twitter followers, this too is free.
I want to introduce you to a site called “twiends.com“. Twiends is a site that allows you to build credits by following others or by participating in several site opportunities. It’s free to register and very easy to use. You get 50 free credits just for registering and another 100 free credits for signing up for the newsletter. Once you have credits, you can offer them to others for following you on Twitter. The cool thing is that you don’t have to do anything more than getting credits. Twiends takes care of the rest. As long as you have credits in your account, Twiends will allow others to follow you and will deduct credits directly for your account. You can specify how many credits people will get just for following you, but it defaults to 2 credits.
If you want to get followers faster, you can boost the number of credits users will get when they follow you. You can also choose to purchase more credits directly from Twiends. Having more credits means getting more followers. The prices for purchasing more credits aren’t bad, but there’s still one more way you can get credits for free. You can go to the section called “Twitter – Get followers” and “twiend” other Twitter users. When you click the green “twiend” button under a user’s pic, you will now be following them on Twitter and you will be credited the number of credits shown above their pic. You can also choose to click the green button that says “twiend all” and after a few minutes, you’ll be following everyone on the current page and be credited for following each of them. However, I’d be careful with this as Twitter keeps an eye on how many people you following in a single day. So, if you choose to “twiend all”, be sure to only use this once a day.
Twiends is also good for getting page likes on Facebook and website visitors. Both work the same as Twitter with the use of credits. So, if you’re intentions are to get more people to your website, you might at least want to check out the “Websites – Get visitors” page while you’re there.
I registered with Twiends today and using the free credits only, I managed to pull in 80 new Twitter followers and more than 100 unique website visitors in the last hour. I am going to work on an automation tool that will “twiend” other users and generate more free credits for me. Once I get it finished, I’ll post a link on here for others to download. Until then, happy Twittering!
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Today Twitter was slammed by a massive javascript exploit. Apparently, over a week ago, a report was sent to Twitter notifying them that a flaw in the javascript exclusion code had been discovered. Unfortunately, nothing was done about it and the new Twitter.com fell victim to the flaw today. Japanese developer Masato Kinugawa accidentally discovered the flaw on August 14, more than a week ago. Twitter has security measures in place to prevent javascript from being inserted into tweets. However, if your URL contained the “@” symbol, Twitter would be tricked into accepting your javascript in a tweet. Then, it would embed that same javascript into your tweet when it was displayed by other users.
Developer Masato illustrated the vulnerability today with the test Twitter account @rainbowtwtr which could change the color of tweets on other users’ profiles. This sort of attack, known as “cross-site scripting”, or “XSS” for short, is a classic and well understood phenomenon that web developers are routinely badgered to be on guard against. These kinds of attacks can be tested for during development, but are still commonly discovered well after the fact. Anyways, the vulnerability has since been patched and Twitter is once again safe to use.
