Import Tweets as Posts or Comments?

Published

February 20, 2013

10 Comments

An interesting discussion is brewing over at Trac about the new Twitter Importer which many users have been looking forward to for their own WordPress-powered properties:

This ticket is to track the development of a plugin that can import tweets from a downloaded twitter.com archive. Presumably, such a plugin would be added to the importers list on wp-admin/import.php.

The gist of the conversations so far that have interested me is the discussion of whether these should be imported as posts, which is the original proposed implementation, or another view presented by Mike Schinkel:

Although I fear the ship may have already sailed I figure I’d post about an alternate approach per chance it wasn’t considered and might be considered instead.

Instead of posts could we instead consider using comments for tweets? Comments model tweets better than posts, and comments already have meta so they can be extended by plugins and themes as needed.

I’d love to use this feature but the idea of dumping 20,000+ posts into a WordPress site that might have less than 100 total real posts causes me a lot of heartache, and I would expect the same might be true for many other advanced users.

For those that have an exceptional amount of tweets (I have over 41k+ tweets) the idea of creating 41,000 blog posts does cause me significant heartburn.

There are those that share this opinion with much more fervor than I can muster, like Chris Wallace:

I cannot truly express the depth of my hatred for importing tweets into WordPress. That is all.

This conversation isn’t entirely new as it’s been a few weeks in the making, but with Wallace’ update it was brought back into my view and it made me really think about which I’d rather prefer.

So, the question is passed on to you: Would you rather see them imported as posts (perhaps as an “aside” or “status” or other post format or just as posts) or would you rather see them imported in some other manner, perhaps as comments?

Love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

There are 10 comments

February 20, 2013 #

Kim

They should be imported as posts, in my opinion. They are a status update when posted on Twitter, why make them a comment on a WordPress install?

I do understand the concern about intermixing all those tweets with actual posts on a blog. I don’t think they should be imported into an existing blog, but given their own WordPress install to live in, which negates that concern.
February 20, 2013 #

Matthew Snider

I would agree with Chris on this one. I am not sure there is a need at all to dump all of your Tweets into WordPress.

I am sure someone will have a need for it, but I wouldn’t want all of my ramblings on my site, even if they were specific to said content.
February 20, 2013 #

Dale Lature (@dlature)

I have a plugin (Twitter Tools by Alex King) whose latest version starting importing Tweets as a Custom Post Type called “Tweets”. I like that. It keeps the tweets in an easily query-able segment of the post data, and leaves open easy additonal customizations .
- February 20, 2013 #
  
  Dale Lature (@dlature)
  
  I’m hoping that this importer will be customizable enough that I can retreive the remaining 6k or so Tweets that Twitter Tools did not grab from my existing TwTools data (those tweets BEFORE I ever started using the plugin and those it did not have because I had my archving feature turned off. I need to get my latest archive and get this importer to grab all the ones I don’t already have, and hopefully allow me to set the kind of post type to which I want to import them (sice I already have a Tweets Post Type.
February 20, 2013 #

mindctrl

I can see a use case for both ways, and while there’s a tendency towards “decisions, not options”, I can see this being a very useful option for the importer to offer.

Importing Tweets into a “status” post makes a lot of sense. This would allow related conversations to take place in comments on each post, and there’s certainly a lot of value in that.

But consider this: creating a post called “John Doe on Twitter”, and importing all the Tweets as comments on that post. That could be a really cool way of doing things, and would keep the Twitter stuff separate from the rest of the site content.

Of course, another option could be to simply allow for tagging or categorization of Tweets that are imported. I don’t know if it already does this, as I haven’t tried it yet.

Both use cases make sense to me. If the default importer doesn’t offer those things, maybe someone can create a plugin that will.
February 20, 2013 #

Greg Fuller

How about one post per week or month of tweets, with each post tagged or categorized as tweets? Each tweet could be wrapped in html tags such that links or meta could be hidden or exposed as desired.
February 20, 2013 #

Mark Root-Wiley

It’s a tough call. I share the initial disdain of thousands of new posts, but I also think it’s probably the wrong way to go for two reasons:

1. People have always struggled to define what a “status” is, but I think a Tweet is about as close a parallel as exists. If that format isn’t good for imported tweets, then why do we have it?

2. It strikes me as odd to have comments that aren’t attached to posts. That seems to be an inherent part of what comments are (at least in my mind), so I don’t like the thought of have lots of free floating comments.
February 20, 2013 #

Tom McFarlin
Whether or not tweets should be imported as comments or posts is definitely up for debate. Whether or not this should be done at all, though, shouldn’t be that much of a debate.

If WordPress is a form of publishing and people publish their tweets, then WordPress is a viable platform for importing tweets.

I don’t really see how this is much different than any other post format or custom post type.
- “I don’t want people importing all of their YouTube videos.” But we have a video post format.
- “I don’t want people importing all of their favorite site URLs.” But we have a link post format.
- “I don’t want people to share the portfolio of their work.” But we have custom post types for portfolios or for photographs.
- …and so on.
If you dislike importing tweets into WordPress, don’t. But it’s against the open nature of publishing that WordPress seeks to provide to dictate what someone should or shouldn’t post.
February 20, 2013 #

Jared Erickson

i see a endless loop for some folks that tweet about what they published…. #inception
- February 20, 2013 #
  
  Tom McFarlin
  
  function tweet_to_wp( $tweet ) { if( 'tweet' == get_post_type() ) { $post_id = wp_insert_post( 'post_content' => $tweet ); if( is_numeric( $post_id ) ) { wp_to_tweet( $tweet ); } } // end if } // end tweet_to_wp function wp_to_tweet( $tweet ) { tweet_to_wp( $tweet ); } // end wp_to_tweet
  
  ^ stack overflow waiting to happen

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