Des Traynor works with Contrast, a web application development company. The team is geographically split (3 in Dublin, 1 in Northern Ireland), so they use Campfire for day to day chatting in order to "recreate the office atmosphere."
Recently they've begun including their twitter feeds in Campfire too. Des says, "This is really helpful as often a tweet by one of us will start a Campfire discussion, and conversely sometimes one of us will tweet the outcome of a Campfire chat."
At Contrast, we use Campfire extensively every day to keep in touch, share links, make plans and discuss projects. We also love Twitter, and often use it to have small public conversations viewable by anyone and everyone, but also to share ideas that often originate from discussions that we’ve had in Campfire.
Last week, Des suggested that it would be great if we could see things that team members were posting on Twitter from inside Campfire. I got the rationale straight away: I often have Campfire open all day, but turn off Twitter, which is often distracting while working on something else. It’s useful and fun to see what the other guys are talking about.
Twitter2Campfire
Anyway, I liked the idea and decided to do something about it. I was able to quickly create a feed on Twitter search that pulls in all tweets from @eoghanmccabe, @paulca, @davidjrice or @destraynor. A small script now runs every minute and pulls in the feed and posts new updates to Campfire. Now we can keep a track of the conversations we’re having outside Campfire, inside Campfire.
I’ve published the source code to the script on GitHub if you’d like to play with it yourself.
