Chris, the CIO/CTO of my day job brought his blog in-house. He is active on Twitter and wanted to provide a resource for other CIOs to find each other on Twitter. So, the concept for the CIO Twitter Dashboard was hatched. The idea is to consolidate on one page as many CIOs using Twitter as possible.
We decided to leverage TwitStamp to create a grid of CIOs. TwitStamp offers a selection of badges as PNG graphics by feeding it a Twitter username. The badge includes the profile picture, the Twitter ID, and the latest Tweet for each user. Once Chris had identified the initial list of CIOs, we tackled the layout challenge for presenting a big pile of badges.
The CIOs were identified by industry and then loaded into a MySql database. PHP was used to cycle through the industries and spit out a DIV per industry with all of the associated CIOs contained within. Some JavaScript/DHTML scripting allowed for the filtering by industry. Then, Chris went about finding more CIOs to add to the dashboard.
After he’d added a few more, it became clear that a way to track updates was called for. So, another PHP script was created to generate an RSS feed of the CIO Tweeps database. Upon subscription, the user would receive an update each time a new item in the feed pointing back to the dashboard. The link on the feed filters to the industry of the new CIO and any CIO added recently was tagged with a “NEW!” badge.
Then, just to bring it full circle, we decided to find a way to Tweet the updates. After looking at PHP scripts to generate a Tweet each time a CIO was added, it made more sense to find a way to use the RSS as the trigger for the Tweet. That’s when I found TwitterFeed. After creating a Twitter ID (ciotweetboard) to send the Tweets, I configured TwitterFeed to look at the RSS once an hour and Tweet up to 2 updates an hour. After some RSS date formatting hiccups, the Tweets began going out. Now, CIOs can find CIOs to follow on the dashboard, and get updates via Twitter from the CIO Tweet Board stream alerting them to new CIOs to follow.
I’m intrigued by the idea of growing a community of connections between professionals (or any other group) this way. Think of it as TwittedIn.