How to Create a Microblogging site Like Twitter ?

Let’s start by understanding what sort of a microblogging site is Twitter? Twitter is a microblogging website where a user can create as well as see tweets created by other people. It is basically writing very short blogs (micro blogs). Twitter currently is the most preferred microblogging website.

In this era of social networking where people take to microblogging for trivial matters, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that microblogging has become a staple for networking enthusiasts. Users can take up to maximum 140 characters to create tweets.

It is important to know here that there are alternatives to Twitter namely Yonkly, Shout’em and many more. With Yonkly you can create a community in less than a minute’s time. Since Shout’em is in the beta version phase, all the premium features are offered for free. FriendFeed, Elgg, Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku and Yammer are other options that netizens can switch to in case they no longer want to use Twitter.

Now…. what? How to go about Microblogging Website Development ? What should be done to create a microblogging website? Are these questions bothering you? If yes, then read on …

• For Twitter the trick of the trade lies in ‘update in seconds’.
• Twitter makes use of super-condensed format for updating posts and comments.
• Facebook too brought about similar changes and incorporated the update functionality wherein the users could update their current statuses.

Website Design and Development includes various functionalities such as search friends; each customer to have a custom profile; cancel registration & account; forgot password; search groups by tags, titles, & description; latest recent posts/updates; registration for new users (with captcha image); latest text updates; instant messaging support (MSN, yahoo, Gtalk); email invitation and post in groups among many others.

Steps you shall follow:

Design the backend of the application

A proper user management should be in place. Database that shows ‘who is following whom?’ shall be in place too. Now what you need to do further is get to record user ID and the follower ID. This would enable you to speedily create a list of followers.

There are three tables with you now: 1. User table. 2. Posts table. 3. Following table.

Create the entry form

You have the backend tables all done and readied. You now need the functionalities to help you easily sail through further. They are: 1. Users to log in and post comments. 2. Disseminate posts to those following users. 3. Allow people to follow other people.

Add a list of updates

In this, the functionality will show all the posts directed to a specific user ID. The easy part is done away with and now you have to let users post their status and see the same being displayed. But wait, something is missing here! What is it? It is only you who can see your updates and nobody else. The next step is carried out to accomplish this task.

Follow other users

• First create an interface that lists all the system users.
• The interface created will allow logged-in users to follow other users.
• This will further enable the users to see the status updates of other users.   
• Now, write a function that informs whom the current user is already following.
• This way the users can benefit from the list and see whom they want to follow and whom they want to ignore. However, you can’t just simply follow/unfollow users.
• You have to look for an existence of a relationship in the following table.
• What is to be done next?
• Show a list of users who are being followed by the user in the next step. Lastly, add posts from other users.