During the last couple of months as we were finalizing details for DotNetNuke OpenForce, I have been working on a Silverlight module that would allow visitors to the OpenForce website to see a real-time feed of Twitter posts related to the conference.  In the past this would have been done by using HashTags.org.  The problem with HashTags is that it requires users to remember to use the ‘#’ prefix to their terms.  It also requires twitter users to follow the @hashtags user.  Both of these requirements limit the usefulness of the service.  What I really wanted was a way to monitor anyone on Twitter who was talking about the conference.

My first attempt with Silverlight quickly ran into technical challenges.  Between cross domain requests (XDR) and the indexing/filtering challenges plus the requirement to have twitterati follow another “special” user, it just seemed like the project would never be complete.  Nor would it achieve the critical mass needed to make such a service valuable.

Well, even while I was working on my solution, Twitter went and bought out the major Twitter search service – Summize.  Summize provides a real-time search service for the twitter feed that allows you to see exactly what people are talking about.  Twitter wasted no time in integrating Summize which can now be found at search.twitter.com.  The Summize search service not only provides a great website for searching twitter posts, but it also provides a simple, yet powerful API as well. 

Yesterday I had the fortune to stumble across the Monitter.com website which leverages jQuery to provide access to the Twitter search API.  This is exactly what I was looking for.  I took the Monitter widget, made a few tweaks and wrapped it in a DotNetNuke module.  I did this to simplify installation and configuration for DotNetNuke administrators.

I dogfooded the module on the OpenForce website for the upcoming North American conference in Las Vegas.  Now that all the obvious bugs have been worked out, I have uploaded the module to the DotNetNuke Forge.  The Forge is a frontend for CodePlex that allows DotNetNuke users to quickly find DotNetNuke modules without requiring DotNetNuke to actually host the project management infrastructure.  You can download the initial release from the Monitter For DNN page on CodePlex.