The Twitter WebPart from Deltascheme surfaces content from Twitter without overloading the Twitter API rate limits – meaning the staff get to see the latest news, from the hottest source, without leaving the corporate network.
The Twitter web part allows searching for tweets using Twitter’s Search API.
- Search for words, hashtags and messages to or from an individual.
- Display the Twitter web part in a 'Widget' format, or SharePoint Web Part format.
- Group by Author.
- Caches the results of a search and avatar images, reducing traffic to Twitter.
Twitter offers a free widget for displaying tweets in another web site. This widget periodically asks Twitter for any new results. However, if Twitter receives too many requests from a particular server it labels that server as a nuisance and temporarily stops replying to it. This is known as "Rate Limiting". Unfortunately, it's quite common for organizations to route their Internet traffic through one gateway server, which appears to Twitter as if it is being a nuisance and making too many requests. Some SharePoint customers found that that Twitter widget would stop working as they were being rate limited. The Twitter web part avoids this problem by adding a cache to SharePoint, so that far fewer requests are sent to Twitter. Some organizations also had prevented their network users from accessing the Internet, which would stop the Twitter widget from working. With the Twitter web part it is the SharePoint farm that is making the request to the Internet, so if it has access to the Internet, it can bring back content from Twitter for users.