Social Retrofit for an Intranet, Part 2: Twitter Widget

This post is another in a series of looks at how to make a traditional - that is, static and impersonal - Intranet come to life and embody social engagement features without throwing the entire edifice out and starting over. (Not that there's anything wrong with adopting a new platform: it's a bigger project, and costlier, but the new generation of social Intranets are pretty compelling).

In the previous post, an external blog got hacked into a website through the use of iframes. "Hack" really is the operative word, and the approach is more evidence that a wholecoth solution is preferable when possible. However, there are many ways to season an old Intranet to enliven it a bit, and in this post we'll look at the variations of Twitter widgets you can easily embed to make your site - internal or external - a little more social and dynamic.

Twitter itself does all the hard work in creating a Twitter widget. On the Twitter site, there's a page that enables you to easily create four different kinds of dynamic feeds:

• Profile Widget: Display your most recent Twitter updates on any webpage. The image at left is an example.

• Search Widget: Displays search results in real time! Ideal for live events, broadcastings, conferences, TV Shows, or even just keeping up with the news.

• Faves Widget: Show off your favorite tweets! Also in real time, this widget will pull in the tweets you've starred as favorites. It's great for moderation.

• List Widget: Put your favorite tweeps into a list! Then show 'em off in a widget. Also great for moderation.

Below is a "Search Widget" which provides a real time feed of tweets containing the words "social" and "intranet". There's also a "List Widget" on this site, which shows a feed of Softjoe members' tweets, accessible at the Twitter Feed link in the menu or here.

To create your Twitter widget, go to twitter.com/about/resources/widgets, and choose the My Website link on the left. There you'll see the four kinds of feed reiterated above; choose the feed type of your choice, and Twitter offers you a set of simple controls to set up things like color, size, title, etc. Each page can show you a real-time preview of the widget as it will appear on your site.

When you're done, click the button that says "Finish & Grab Code", and you'll get an eit control that has about 33 lines of code that you can copy and paste into your web site.