With all of the news about a possible Twitter sale to Google, I am wondering if we will see an increased trend in clients looking for micro-blogging sites and “Twitter Clones” for local and niche communication. Already, I am offering Twitter and Social Network integration (Facebook, mySpace) to clients on blog and ecommerce sites, to easily connect with friends, community, marketing, communication, etc. that takes place on those sites from the main domain. More and more people are including their Facebook status messages and Twitter stream on their homepages, using the API & RSS feeds those sites offer to pull social content across network channels.

WordPress Plugins:

Xavisys, the web development company behind WebDevNews.net, has created a Twitter feed module for WordPress called WordPress Twitter Widget Pro.

Drupal Modules:
For Drupal, I find the best module to be Activity Stream.

This module will republish all of your “tweets” into your Drupal site, as well as building a stream from your Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and other social networking and bookmarking sites. Highly recommended.

Also very promising for Drupal, but still in development, is the Facebook Status module (Facebook-style Statuses).

As expected, this module replicates the Facebook “Wall” and allows users to post status messages on their user profile pages. When I tried the module previously, there were still some bugs that would have prevented its use on a live site, but huge potential here with this module and a 2.0 version is now released.

The Twitter module allows users to:

1. Associate one of more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account
2. Have their tweets displayed in a sidebar block or on their user profile
3. Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content

http://drupal.org/project/twitter

The Tapatio Projects seeks to build an installation profile for Drupal that “enable(s) users to leverage a drupal system as a front end to twitter.com (and other sources in the future) allowing them to use drupal as a hub for message aggregation, moderation, and dispatching.”

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio_installation_profile

Stan alone CMS Software:

If you are interested in breaking out from a CMS like Drupal or WordPress and building a site that is a stand alone micro-blogging platform like Twitter, the Laconica open source software may be of interest.

For an example of a Laconica site, see: http://identi.ca/

The alternative to Laconica (but operating on the same open source micro-blogging standard) is Open Microblogger

By design, the open-source micro-blogging sites share an API to allow easy cross posting and searching of messages between sites. They also have more advanced built in SMS capabilities, something you will have to add extra modules for in Drupal & WordPress.

Whether your client is requesting Twitter integration into their home page or business site, or you have a request to build a full micro-blogging platform, one of these solutions should make a good base to build upon.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development. Open Source Micro-Blogging CMS Software & Twitter Integrations