Using Twitter through Commands

Hi World,

We released http://www.kaanzi.com/ a few weeks ago. It has been getting some notice recently and we are absolutely exhilarated about it.

For anyone who is new to kaanzi, it is a new way to access services across the web though commands. Please read the following for some more details http://tmblr.co/ZhTl0wFw1ehd .

Why am I writing this?

We are thinking of how to expand the application based on what would help people. We want to make a product that truly adds value to the user. We would love more people to use kaanzi command prompt to use their favorite services, in hopes of improving the quality of our idea and implementation.

I plan to blog separately about each of the services we integrated in hopes of getting more people to try out these implementations. I believe the more we can get real users to try it out, the better iterations of the idea can be implemented, and ultimately, we can cater better to the masses :)

Using Twitter through Commands?

Here is the good news everyone. You can perform a handful of tasks in twitter through http://www.kaanzi.com/. These include a highly customizable system of searching twitter, reading twitter timeline (wall feed) and posting twitter status updates. 

Why do we want to use twitter through commands?

First of all, this is a fun and focused alternative to doing the same set of tasks we do in the traditional method. Second, when we can run the twitter commands, and move onto the next service within the same tool, we believe that adds efficiency to how we use the web.

So what are the commands?

Lets start with “search twitter” command. You don’t need to login to twitter to run this command, so it seems like a good point to start.

“search twitter” command is a very customizable way to get twitter results. Once you visit http://www.kaanzi.com/, try out the following search twitter commands:

  • To search for a particular term, just run “search twitter” followed by the term. Example: “search twitter leap year” gives you what people have tweeted recently about the topic “leap year”.
  • You can search for tweets from a particular person by running “search twitter” followed by “from:username” syntax. Example: “search twitter from:barackobama” gives you back tweets by Obama.
  • You can customize your search result based on combining the previous cases. Example: “search twitter campaign from:barackobama” gives back recent tweets from Obama that has the term “campaign” in it.
  • Likewise, you can search for tweets addressed to a particular user by running “search twitter” followed by “to:username” syntax. Example: “search twitter marry me to:justinbieber” gives back the recent tweets addressed to Justin Bieber that includes the term “marry me”.

The other commands: reading twitter timeline and posting twitter status require logging into the service. So let’s start with that:

  • “login twitter” command gets you singed into twitter, and lets kaanzi get the permission to read your twitter timeline and post status updates. “login twitter” opens a popup that redirects back to kaanzi once you sign in through the twitter’s popup sign in window.

Once logged in, you can run the following commands:

  • “read twitter stream” gives back your home timeline stream. Easy and simple.
  • The syntax “post twitter status” followed by “status update content” lets you post a twitter status update. Example: “post twitter status checking out http://www.kaanzi.com/” updates your latest twitter update with the content “checking out http://www.kaanzi.com”.

What now?

This is the implementation of twitter to our service as of now. I hope you enjoyed it, and I am extremely grateful for the time you invested in trying these out :). We would appreciate nothing more than some feedback. We want to innovate cool and intuitive commands to help people run services scattered around the web through one portal.

Thank you very much for reading this far :)

Take it easy.

-easymode