Tweetboard Brings Twitter Discussion to Your Site

Tweetboard is an application that creates a micro-forum on your website using your Twitter stream. It’s near real-time since tweets will appear in less than 60 seconds. Your Twitter conversations are automatically threaded with unlimited nesting, which makes it easy to follow each discussion and get a broader picture of all conversations.

When a user visits your site, they will see an unobtrusive tab on the left side. The tab is labeled “tweets” and will usually indicate how many tweets have occurred since their last visit. Clicking the tab will expand a pretty attractive view of your Twitter timeline, including All tweets and New tweets since their last visit.

A visitor can view a conversation as pictured at the left, with the tweets threaded beneath each other. If they so choose, they can login using oAuth to send tweets directly from your site or reply to any of the tweets in view.

Anytime a tweet is sent from your tweetboard, a link to that specific page of your site is appended. To say it another way, each page or post on your site has it’s own tweetboard created based on the tweets referring to that specific thread. This gives Tweetboard conversations a viral aspect that should promote your site and potentially increase your traffic.

As an example, I started the conversation pictured here accidentally just playing with Tweetboard (oops), but you will only see it exactly as pictured if you follow the resulting link from Twitter. Apparently, there is some magic behind the shortened links created by Tweetboard that actually keeps everything in order.

There are definitely services that provide similar features to Tweetboard, but none do exactly the same thing. Convotrack will pull in tweets about a specific site, but it doesn’t thread the conversation or even allow you to participate directly. Google Sidewiki creates an entirely separate layer of discussion over the entire web and doesn’t integrate Twitter at all at this point. Google owns it all.

I think the biggest tweak necessary for Tweetboard to become infinitely more useful is to include links back to the specific pages on which each thread was actually started. Yes, that’s right, each link created by Tweetboard currently points back to the root of your website. This makes it pretty confusing to see what page or post originally started the thread. I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature.

Overall, Tweetboard is pretty awesome and I’ll be running it on my personal blog. It can only get better from here. Request your free alpha invite and then tell us what you think.