In this post on Programmable Web’s blog, Adam DuVander provides a really good glimpse of the future potential to do lot’s more with Twitter than conduct searches for mentions (or complaints) that involve the name of a particular company or its products. Twitter’s new “User Streams API” (application programming interface) will make it possible for applications to display real time feeds from individual Twitter users that take into account that user’s indicated (and presumably approved or “published”) location, interests and activities.

Until now, as DuVander explains, application developers could bring Twitter-based content into their user interface through search or by pasting in the stream itself. Think of the new service as a way to include Twitter-based content that can be tailored by a viewer’s interests and keys off the activities of a selected individual or group. Twitter provides some insights and guidelines (including use cases) for the API in this post. It is telling (in a good way) that the first guideline is to declare all information in a “protected” account as “non-public” and therefore out-of-bounds for services that refer to the output of the streamed API.

Of special interest to customer care, social CRM and VRM professionals should be the additional metadata that is included in the API or “feed”. It has the potential to let users know when a Twitterer favorites a site, retweets a message, follows a new twitter or makes changes to a list. As I recently wrote, Programmable Web was purchased by Alcatel-Lucent, which is aggressively working to to integrate (mashup?) the customer interaction management resources of Genesys Labs with the rest of its Enterprise Software Group. With so much attention focused on bringing social media content into the customer care contact center workflow, an easy way to incorporate real-time streams should be much appreciated.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, Twitter, Contact Centers, Recombinant Communications