TwitterVote: the very easy way to conduct a vote or poll via Twitter
Last week I wrote a little site called TwitterVote. TwitterVote allows you to use Twitter for the purposes of voting.
A few people have asked me about it and if they can use it. Well, here it is, feel free to use it whenever you want to conduct a vote or poll using twitter.
It’s very simple to use. All you need to do is type a URL that matches your vote.
For example the following URL…
http://twittervote.fejus.com/?hashtag=nowplaying&keywords=madonna,cher,prince,gaga
…will yield the following page
That’s all there is to it, simple and obvious really. The hashtag parameter tells it what hashtag to look for and the keywords parameter is a comma delimited list words or names that it will search for.
So, in this instance, a successful vote/tweet for Madonna would look something like “#playingnow madonna”.
There are few optional parameters that you can pass down that will modify the way it works…
&count=3 – use this to limit the result set to only show the top 3 results.
&state=names – use this to have the page not show the results but rather the keywords. at any time, you can click on the screen and toggle the results and list of keywords. This is particularly handy when you don’t want to reveal the results but want people to see who/what they can vote for.
So, a complete example would be http://twittervote.fejus.com/?hashtag=nowplaying&keywords=madonna,cher,prince,gaga&count=3&state=names.
It’s also worth noting that once all the votes are collected, the page will continue to poll for new results every 10 seconds. It’s pretty cool to see the results change live.
Also, remember that if people are not sharing their tweets publically, they will not show up in the search results.
That’s it, drop me a note if you use TwitterVote and found it useful.
PS jQuery, I love you!
-mk
the twitter voting app that i wrote for #ignitesydney http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=891
the twitter voting app that i wrote for #ignitesydney http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=891
RT @delic8genius the twitter voting app that i wrote for #ignitesydney http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=891
RT @delic8genius: the twitter voting app that i wrote for #ignitesydney http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=891
That’s a great idea! Is there a neat way to embed it into a web page? That’d definitely be useful! An example of what I’m thinking – you could put the call out to readers of a blog or website to vote on something on Twitter and display the current results underneath.
@Patrick Catanzariti
Great idea mate. you could always embed it as an iframe. but embed code would be nice. happy for someone else to take ovet the codebase and support it
@delicategenius
Yeah I considered the iframe idea too but thought it might be a little bit messier than finding a way to put it straight onto a page. I’m interested now, so I’ll have a play around when I get time and see if I can find a simple way to embed it into web pages. Will be a fun experiment!
I like it, is there a way you can set it to only poll between certain dates?
@brent not at this stage. the problem is twitter search api, as real time as it may be, has a limited memory and seems to drop off items over a week or so old.
@mrstartup Here is some ref for the #SWBoston twitter voting app. http://bit.ly/x0iAV & http://bit.ly/dhmDSn