Twitter Groups for Your Website

Twitster’s hash tag filtering helped provide a central conversation hub for the 2009 eComm Conference. Conference attendees provided their Twitter accounts as part of the registration process and Lee Dryburgh, founder of eComm Media and the eComm Conference, used Twitster to create an instant community on the site.

Because he used Twitster’s tag filtering to follow a conference-specific tag, people visiting the site got to follow along with this highly concentrated conversation about eComm 2009 and the state of the telecommunication industry.

In Lee’s own words:

Twitster rocked my conference, providing an active backchannel for discussion without being distracting like IRC. Plus, it gave me the power to host the community on my own web site, which made it easier for me to promote and manage my community.

The resulting site was also set to refresh every few minutes and displayed up on screens at the conference so even those without Twitter got to follow along with the conversation.

So you want to try Twitster, but you're not sure how involved the process is?

I put together a three-minute screencast that will give you a good idea of how easy the setup is from the time you download Twitster to the time you're looking at your friend's tweets on your own site:

Thanks for taking the time to check out Twitster, a new open source application that makes it like crazy-easy to build a Twitter-based community on your web site.

Twitster was the brain child of Byrne and I after we deployed a similar application to help power and bring together a Twitter community around Movable Type. The project was called “HashMT,” which got its name from its ability to aggregate and publish tweets augmented with the twitter tag “#mt”.

When we saw what we created, we thought to ourselves, “huh, I think others might want to use this for their web sites and projects.” And so, Twitster was born.

We hope you like it and look forward to seeing how people use it!