Rip and Run Twitter Integration

  Friday, May 29th 2009

First a disclaimer, I'm not a Twitter "fan", advocate, user or opponent. Obviously there's been plenty of press and news regarding twitter - if you watch TV, follow the news, or surf the net, you've no doubt heard about Twitter.

But I started to hear reports that Twitter will allow you to receive and send SMS text messages to interact with their service. The software that I wrote to send text messages does require a (albeit small) fee - and by using Twitter, we could eliminate this overhead for a fire department. I found this particularly appetizing as fire department budgets are becoming increasingly lean, and some smaller departments, already have constrained budgets. Secondly, text messaging is probably the preferred method to receive call notifications on your cell phone (compared to say email or voice dialing) - so having this service free, is that much more appealing.

So is this all about cost?...Absolutely not! When I started investigating the feasibility of using Twitter, I began to see that the "twitter methodology" does suit itself nicely to the concept of our "Rip and Runs" and "call records".

Now what do I mean by this? Well Twitter is basically a way to record a quick status about your life, so if you consider a fire call (or an emergency) an event, you can quickly abstract this concept out to see that using Twitter can essentially provide a method of recording all emergencies that a fire company is dispatched to.

With this listing of calls, a fire company could - in effect, be getting a "quick and dirty" call listing (for reporting perhaps), and also a "quick and dirty" website for some public relations. Some may choose not to publish the content of the emergencies that the company responds to, and there is a way to hide all of the postings so that only "friends" can see them - i.e. the people that are granted permission to see them can.

So you can see that right out of the box, Twitter provides functionalty that readily lends itself to call recording. If a department doesn't have this type of reporting available, you could simply go to the Twitter page of the rip and run for your company, and see the most recent calls for your agency - for free. So no software costs - no installation costs, its all available easily for all your members to see online.

Additionally, I have found that its very easy to include "tweets" (individual messages posted on the Twitter webpage) on another website via a widget. So you could, for example, provide a listing of a fire company's calls on the fire company's webpage - which is completely separate from Twitter. This way, you can get real-time updated call information on a fire company's home page, without having to pay development costs (you can view some of these free apps on the twitter webpage: http://twitter.com/downloads).

Perhaps the biggest reason to move towards Twitter, is because then the subscription and permissions concerns are pretty much taken care of separately from the Rip and Run software. So there would be no "development" or configuration changes that need to happen on the Rip and Run server - which is a big plus. So the way I envision that firefighters will "subscribe" to recieve SMS text messages from my Rip and Run software is:

1. Simply create a Twitter account
2. Configure with your cell phone information (directions available on twitter.com)
3. Request to be a "follower" of the given "Rip and Run" Twitter account. For example, GFD's Rip and Run account is http://www.twitter.com/greenfieldfd
4. The administrator then either grants permission to this requests, or denies it. This provides a level of security to ensure that only the authorized people (granted by the administrator).

And that's it - pretty easy and it requires no configuration changes on the Rip and Run server - which as I said, is a big plus. Anytime you make changes to the server, you typically have to take it off line for a small amount of time - and that's a hassle.

I am currently working on Twitter integration and so far things look very good - it does look very possible to get this to work as a "Rip and Run" text messaging service.

I'll post more information as it becomes available and in the meantime, if you have questions, please feel free to ask! Hopefully it won't be too long until we start field testing this!

posted by spackmann in Rip and Run Development at 1:12 PM (469 day(s) old)  Permalink