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Configuration: Twitter

pdurbin edited this page Oct 20, 2011 · 7 revisions

Once you've installed ThinkUp and registered to sign in, you'll be prompted to connect ThinkUp to your Twitter account. Just follow along with the steps below.

Configure ThinkUp's Twitter Settings

This page lets you configure ThinkUp to talk to Twitter. You will be taken to a Twitter page that sets up an application, which allows ThinkUp to interact with Twitter on your behalf. First, where it says "Set the callback URL to", you'll see a web address that Twitter will need to set up your application. Copy and paste this now, then click the link to "Register Your ThinkUp Application on Twitter."

Note: If you have multiple Twitter accounts, make sure you log into Twitter using the correct account before going forward.

Thinkup-twitter-plugin-config

Make an "Application" on Twitter

Once you've clicked the link to Twitter, you'll see a link to "Register a new application". Click on that!

Thinkup-twitter-register-app

Registering an application on Twitter is pretty self-explanatory; You can use pretty much whatever information you want to fill in the Application Name, Description, Website, and Organization fields. (Twitter will complain if you leave the Description blank, so just put in something clever.) The key thing here is that you go to the "Callback URL" field and paste in the web address that you copied from your ThinkUp install. Everything else should be the default settings: It's a "Browser" type application (not "Client"), and doesn't use Twitter for login. ThinkUp only needs "Read" access (not "Read & Write"), but future versions might make use of Read & Write features, so you can set this however you prefer.

Note: The "Callback URL" that you paste in to this page has to be accessible from the web for Twitter's connection to work. If your address is set to "localhost" or another address that's not a full domain name or a usable IP address, this step isn't going to work without some complicated workarounds. (Some users have had success installing the domain on an external server to generate the Twitter authorization tokens, then cloning the database to an internal developmental server. See Setting up ThinkUp locally )

Thinkup-twitter-app-config

Get the Application Settings From Twitter

Once you've jumped through all those hoops and finally got the CAPTCHA text correct, you'll be rewarded with the details of your Twitter application. The information on the first two lines is what you'll want to copy and paste back in to your ThinkUp install to finish the connection — that's the Consumer Key, which is about 22 characters of gibberish, and the Consumer Secret, which is a really big, long string of gibberish characters.

Thinkup-twitter-app-details

Enter Your Twitter Application Settings in ThinkUp

You paste those two bits of information from the Twitter app in to the matching fields in your ThinkUp settings, like so:

Thinkup-plugin-config-complete

You probably don't need to worry about the other settings on this page — just hit "Save Options" and your Twitter configuration should be complete!

What the Twitter plugin collects

The Twitter plugin collects your tweets, your friends' tweets, mentions of your @username, retweets of any of your tweets, your favorite tweets, the tweets you've replied to, your follower count (every crawl), the users you follow, the users who follow you, all links in all the tweets captured, image thumbnails from links in all the captured tweets, individual places (lat/long, place name), places as they are related to individual tweets and users, hashtags (realtime only), what tweets of yours anyone has favorited (realtime only), and relationships between users (whether or not they've friended/followed each other).

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