I saw a few tweets about Tweetboard in my Twitter timeline this morning and decided to check it out. A quick request for an alpha account got things done. The installation is pretty simple; it just involves the user to paste a simple code in the site. Once tweetboard is installed, you need to login with your twitter account to provide the auth token.
Ok. Now what?
The tweetboard site says
Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.
Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.
Why I love tweetboard,
1) Engages visitors into a micro forum, increases stickiness.
2) Introduces non twitter users to this amazing manna from heaven called Twitter!
3) Tweets posted through Tweetboard in your site gets posted in your timeline with a permalink to your site thus increasing traffic to your site through exclusive Tweetboard urls, posted.at and inreply.to. The destination url would be of the format - http://sathyanarain.com/#tboard_168724
But why I may not use Tweetboard,
1) Page load time increases by a few seconds
2) Though the permalinks are useful in tracking the conversation, it occupies part of the tweet. Sometimes, it is with much difficulty that I try to make a point in twitter within 140 characters. The posted.at and inreply.to permalinks take up 20 characters as of now. *20 precious characters*. And they’re bound to increase as more users start using Tweetboard.
3) The Tweetboard support page does not have a link to the homepage! duh!
Update on the 1st of July at 2250 hours: Here’s another problem with tweetboard — Good friend, Mayank read this review and left a tweet as comment in my blog’s tweetboard which is to your left. He just wrote a tweet. And the tweet had a posted.to link to my blog, but not an @reply. I had no clue about the tweet until I randomly checked Mayank’s timeline.
I hope Tweetboard’s beta release solves these issues.
You guys can have a look at how Tweetboard works in this site to the left of the screen where you see a Red colored label. Clicking on it opens my tweets.
So do you like Tweetboard?
You can follow the creators of this microforum on twitter @140WARE for updates about developments.
Update on the 1st of July at 1810 hours: Here’s what Mayank has got to say about Tweetdeck.
You can follow me on twitter @msnarain






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