Twitter Spy – Real Time News Plugin For WordPress

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Real time news is all the rage. Tweets coming from Twitter are being used to drive social movements, advertise services, and connect people instantly. What if you could move those conversations to your website and have them update in real time?

I made Twitter Spy to do just that. Deliver any type of message feed from Twitter to your WordPress blog, in real time.

Features:

1. Real time refresh using jquery. As soon as it’s tweeted, Twitter Spy will display it on the website
2. Unlimited feed options. You can create search queries for the news to deliver based on keywords and/or location.
3. Advanced query options allow you to deliver the exact news feed. For example, Let’s say you have a blog about parenting and babies. You can set up a query like “baby #baby -Celtics”. This query will get all tweets about babies, and not deliver tweets about “Big Baby”. Big Baby is a basketball player for the boston Celtics. I doubt any moms are tweeting about him.
4. Low memory usage. I’ve let it run for hours on my browser with no problems.
5. No database install. I use cookies to get the most recent news so your website is not downloading large files.

Built with jquery spy. It also uses Google geocoder to get the longitude and latitude for location specific news feeds. You also need php 5 because I use simplexml

Example of plugin

Download the Twitter-Spy plugin here

How to use:

1. Install just like any other plugin.
2. Once activated, go to settings > Twitter Spy and configure it. The plugin makes a WordPress page for you. Both keywords and location is optional. Meaning you can make a news feed about real estate without a location, or only get the tweets about real estate within x-miles of your desired location. You can also use only location without keywords to get all the tweets from people in a certain area.
3. There is a sidebar widget that will use the same keywords and location as the full page plugin.

You can only make one twitter spy page with this plugin, but you can manually add the function if you need more then one page with different search criteria.

display_spy('spycontainer', '"real estate"', "Real Estate", "37.7723230 -122.2148970", "The Bay Area", "50mi", 20);

Oakland CA geolocated is 37.7723230 -122.2148970

There are a couple bugs I’m working out.

1. the tweets are suppose to fade in… but something with WP is breaking that.
2. since I use cookies, sometimes, the most recent tweet will get tweeted twice on page reload…

Please try it, and let me know what you think. I’m also open to any future additions to it.