The Helpdesk received a request for a WordPress Twitter plugin. If we decide it would be good to have such a plugin, what kind of functionality would useful for the Midd community. See:
http://blueprintds.com/2009/01/19/top-twitter-wordpress-plugin-roundup/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/04/10-best-twitter-tools-for-wordpress-blogs/
Once again, what is the need? A request for a “Twitter Plugin” is not enough information to be helpful. As shown in the the links above, there are many different types of Twitter plugins that solve many different (and sometimes mutually exclusive) needs.
Possible needs:
Display tweets from a person.
Display tweets from a tag.
Convert excerpts of blog posts into tweets.
Convert tweets into blog posts.
Convert twitter replies into post comments.
Display geotagged tweets on a map.
Send post alerts as twitter direct messages.
Which of these (or something else) is being described as a need? Until we know what the need is, we can not begin to determine if it would be good to have a plugin that fulfills that need.
Your list of possible needs is great. The person who requested a Twitter plugin for WordPress said she needed “a blog post to be created from a Tweet.”
The challenge I see for us is to determine what most people in the Midd community “want” now or are likely to “want” in the future and then find tools/services/technologies that may or may not be exactly what they wanted, but hopefully will meet their needs…