Chapter 6. TwitterVote
AUTHOR: Clint Rutkas (http://betterthaneveryone.com/), Dan Fernandez, and Brian Peek
DIFFICULTY: Intermediate
TIME REQUIRED: 3–6 hours
COST: Free
SOFTWARE: Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
HARDWARE: None
DOWNLOAD: http://www.c4fbook.com/TwitterVote
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) is a web application that allows friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else to instantly communicate with each other (and to the world at large) by sending quick, short messages via a web browser, cell phone text message, or a variety of other client applications. Many refer to Twitter as a microblogging platform, but it is also a form of mass, public communication via a format similar to instant messaging. A message sent to Twitter is referred to as a "tweet." We'll primarily refer to status updates as tweets for the rest of this chapter.
Twitter is a great tool and has some amazing strengths. For example, it is free, it fosters an astounding community, and it exposes a fairly strong API (application programming interface) model.
In this chapter, we will develop an application called TwitterVote. TwitterVote is a web application that enables you to build custom online polls that allows other users to cast their vote via Twitter. For example, you can create a poll asking your friends what their favorite video game console is, with the choices of "Wii, PS3, Xbox360". They can then reply with their vote, and you can calculate and view the results.
Overview
To use Twitter, you will need ...
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