Timani I

Recently i was working with the Facebook AP again, before i did my presentation at the Seattle PHP meetup . At the time one of the potential ideas was the linkedIn API and how to integrate linkedIn to your site, but obviously facebook was the API in demand.

As i was playing around with the linkedIn API and i managed to stumble upon the widgets that are one the developer site, and thought it would interesting to add them to your WordPress site.

I am sure that this is ideal for portfolio or sites, real-estate agents, companies adding some social networking flair to their site, blogs or in your mashups. Getting the work done is less than 5 minutes and does not require you to actually get into any code. The process really will only consist of a few steps:

1. Go to the developer site

From here you can get an idea of what the available widgets are and what they look like. There is an important note at the top of the page with Terms and conditions which you should check out first.

LinkedIn profile widget

2. Decide which type of profile widget you want to display

There are currently two versions, the popup and the inline version. The popup version is the one that i am currently using on my blog, where the name of the person appears with linkedIn icon beside it, and once you click on it the profile “pops” up.

The second is the inline version of the profile widget where the widget displays the entire public profile. I have made a video that you can check out at the end of the post where i actually do this, i chose the inline version for that demo.

3. Decide where you want the widget the appear.

You are going to need a widget area available so you can drop in you profile. Check the video at the end if you need a hint.

4. Grab and paste in the linkedIn profile widget script and copy it to your clipboard:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.linkedin.com/js/public-profile/widget-os.js></script>

5. Go to you admin area and add the script tag

Widget Area on WordPress

Go to the Themes -> Widgets section of your site and grab a text widget.
Drag and drop the text widget on the to the Widget area you want.
When you are inside paste the linkedIn profile widget script you copied earlier.

6. Paste in your linkedIn profile code depending on which one you want

<a class="linkedin-profileinsider-popup" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/timanitunduwan">Timani Tunduwani</a> - For popup
<a class="linkedin-profileinsider-inline" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/timanitunduwani">Timani Tunduwani</a> - For inline

7. Add your public profile URL to the link

To do this i logged into my linkedIn account, and clicked the “Profile” link in the header. As you can see in the image if you scroll down on you just around the fold, you will see a label called “Public Profile” with a hyperlink next to it(this is going to be your public profile link on ).
Once you have done this replace your profile link and name with your desired widget code in step 6.

8. Finally add your newly formatted link

Go back to your widgets section and paste in the code you just modified into the same text widget as in step 4 below the script you had added before and you are done.

Demo:

Timani Tunduwani

In case you prefer to actually see a video on how to get this done here we go:

A couple of notes:

1. According to linkedIn the script tag should be placed in the head section for faster loading. (This could also be done from the admin area if you had enough permissions to edit theme files and depending on the theme)

2. Once you have added in the script tag in step 4 you can then add more than one profile link to a page.

3.After adding the script is you must keep the class names:  linkedin-profileinsider-inline or must be on the your desired links so the linkedIn script will know which links to parse and generate the widgets correctly

4. Using the inline method can be a bit slow at time and affect your page load, especially if you are going to have number of profiles on a page.

5. You can easily just paste the script tag into a widget or your header and then simply  add the popup or inline style to any post like i did in the demo above.

I think at the moment, there aren’t that many option i can see to play around with. With time as the API grows and you are able to configure things like which sections to display, the option of having your picture, customizing the look and feel more to match your site. I think then it would actually worth coding a plugin, but at the moment this is a decent fix.

I think it is a definite reflection on the direction that social marketing is taken when Twitter is being used to predict box office hits, misses and general forecast number, with very good accuracy considering the nature of the subject, the old tweet.

As i read the BBC i saw an article about Computer scientists from the HP lab of social computing analysed about 3 million tweets from about 25 movies. First off it is great to see more quantitative data, as it starts to give a better handle on the larger scale influences social networking has on our lives. So the fact corporations like HP have taken the impact so seriously they have allocated resources and an entire department, dedicated to trends and scientific analysis of the Facebook,   Foursquare and others on our lives outside of the web.

image via flickr

Dr. Bernardo Huberman who is the head of the social computing lab at HP noted something important, all-be-it slightly intuitive,

“Our intuition was that the faster people tweet, the more likely they are to go and see it.”

This is essentially “Buzz” which anyone who has had to do any marketing is exactly what you want to generate interest and attract  potential readers/clients/customers/donors/viewers to whatever your product is, movies, corporate sites, blogs or otherwise.

In all honesty some of the box office predictions are quite accurate, and were done using the US movie box office as a base  for this analysis. Unfortunately the page with the actual results wasn’t available but i will search to see if i can find the actual paper these guys put together.I must admit though, i am really curious as to what the formula and methodology is behind this:

One thing that they did note is the demographic of technologically inclined, younger Tweeters, so as a person of active, tweeting age (we will assume above at least 9 at this point) would likely not be tweeting about a new childrens’ movie, even thought it the movie may be a financial success. The reason being a person within that age wouldn’t be fighting in line with some 6th graders to get into a childrens’ movie.

But being able to analyse Twitter in this way and get such close result for  box-office sales, it would be interesting to see what other social experiments could be conducted, and what are currently underway, hmmmmm….

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• Twitter predicts box office hits (news.bbc.co.uk)

It seems that more and more as social networks evolve that there is a greater demand and influence on social currency as a means of stimilating user interaction and participation. That in combination with the fast growing trend of geolocation based services has led to some interesting mashups, but of interest today is the nifty Foursquare website that offers something for both users as clients and for business too. So lets get down to the basic questions so we know what is going on: who, what, where, when, how and why!

Who is Foursquare?

Well according to the about section of foursquare it seems that this was the idea of a couple of friends or developers who got together and decided to create a mashup application that would build on the last phase of social applications like Twitter, and Facebook. Digging slightly deeper we were able to find their Crunchbase profile and get the a better idea of who they are.

What is Foursquare?

We’ll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for
discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people. – foursquare.com

The ultimate goal is to become a “Mayor” of you city, and along the way earn badges, find out what is happening in your city, and enjoy all the cool things that your friends in your various social circles are having fun with.

What makes this so dynamic is the “Real” real-time aspect of this application. Previously with twitter, you were merely able to just post a tweet from your phone with 140 characters of where you were or what you were doing. That was a limited amount of information and a lot of the impact could have been lost.

This isn’t the case with Foursquare as you can add extra information to the location such as a handy tip like a time of day for free coffee, promotions and other give-aways that may exist.. Thus, this way you can have a more involved experience, and make determinations and decisions about where to go, when, and what to do once you go there.

Why would anyone bother to do all this?

Well the concept of getting information out in real time is not new, as seen in the status messages on networks like facebook, myspace, and twitter, to activity feeds that stream real-time data about your social network. This really in the end bears no benefits in the long term other than knowing what people are randomly doing.

With foursquare you get the opportunity to earn great rewards from business who would like to have their places promoted more on the site. This ranges from a very long list of restaurants and bars to sound recording studios and retail stores. Some of the perks are:

1. $1 macchiatos
2. Free Slice & drink on your 10th checkin.
3. Free Shot on your 10th check-in
4. Free Auto-Tune Karaoke

Conclusion

The thing that makes foursquare so immediate is because it is so focused on real-time and you have the ability to check-in to various places to earn points from your phone or mobile device as well as your pc. It seems that there was clear planning and foresight as you can download a number of mobile platforms, like the iPhone app, the Android app, and the Blackberry app.

So as the service continues to rapidly grow you can be sure that you can expect the list of business that support, and list of offers to grow. Thus getting connected to foursquare may not be that bad of an idea.

When looking to add photos to your WordPress site there are definitely a very long list of plugins available to get the job done, and provide a number of handy tools like template tags and shortcodes to throw in your posts and pages.

Whether you are looking to search and add content to your posts from flickr, or you are merely trying to post pictures that you have shared and uploaded to flickr on your site.

If you have ever wanted to do that you may have actually come across one of these plugins.

1. Simple Flickr Plugin
2. WordPress Flickr Manager
3. Flickr Tag Cloud Widget
4. Flick Photo Album

But sometimes you may need more functionality, or want to directly get access to more methods and parameters available on the Flickr API. As a result if the decision is to write your own plugin to get this done, you would likely try and find a 3rd party library to help you get this done faster.

The phpFlickr Library

This is where the phpFlickr library comes in handy. It is possible to actually spend the time going through the API and develop your own library, however you would encounter a number of issues that a more established library or established set of tools may not face.

Plugin Name: phpFlickr library

Plugin URL: http://phpflickr.com/

Demo: http://flyr.whatfettle.com/

Docs: Plugin Documentation

Benefits of choosing phpFlickr vs coding from scratch

1. Speed of development when you are not building from the ground up.
2. Better established libraries are well documented and easy to extend.
3. Caching and storage mechanisms may already be in place whereas from scratch you may have to work this in manually.
4. Strong communities and support  – this would allow you to get support from the community about the library.
5. Better tested and stable – Most of the time you will encounter problems that a more established library may already have encountered and handled. As a developer you will have to spend the time researching and testing what could be simple functionality to keep the application glued together, rather than spend the time on building and testing their apps more advanced functionality.
6. Easy to use and lots of code examples to test and get you going.

Summary

Getting hands-on with an API and getting dirty, digging in and seeing what it can do is often the best way to begin your plugin development if you want to extend a 3rd part API. Using APIs is a great way to integrate lots of dynamic content to your site as well as add extra paths to monetize your blog or website, such as with Amazon, iTunes, themeforest, and affliate networks.

If you are looking to get deeper into the Flickr api or just wanting to get a feel for what the API can do the phpFlickr library certainly had a lot of features to make most things you need to do possible. With the addition of handy extra features like the caching, you can make sure you are not taxing your server bandwith, or making unnecessary calls to the API.