Detecting and displaying the information of a logged-in twitter user

Wouldn’t it be cool (and somehow creepy) to greet your visitors by their twitter name, and maybe ask them to tweet a post? It can be really easily done.

Check it out yourself: Hello Twitter Demo
Update: this is not working any longer. Twitter have discontinued this functionality because of the phishing opportunities it posed.

This page should show you your avatar, name, location and latest update when you are logged into twitter. If nothing show up you either are not logged in or already exceeded your API limit for the hour (if you have twhirl running, like me, that can happen fast)

This is actually very easy to do as a logged-in twitter user can be detected with a simple API call in a script node:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=1&callback=yourcallback

All you need to do is provide a callback function that gets the data provided by the API and get the right information out. The demo does this by assembling a string:

Trying to think of a cool use for this that is not spooky :)

Tags: api, callback, hello, javascript, JSON, personalization, trick, twitter