I thought I would have a go at creating a web part to display a Twitter public timeline within SharePoint. The reason for creating this web part is so that it can be used by project teams that are spread over several offices/countries to stay in touch and feel more connected without having to invest a lot of time emailing each other or talking on the phone. Twitter is ideal for this kind of light weight communication as it restricts the user to sending short, to the point messages.
Before starting I had a quick look on the web to see if I was reinventing the wheel. Michael Gannotti suggests this solution using javascript and the CEWP but I wanted something that we would have a little more control over in terms of html markup and branding and that wasn't limited to the CEWP being available. I also wanted to have the possibility of extending the web part to include other functionality in the future such as not just being able to display tweets but to also send them.
The web part is configurable using two custom attributes - username and password. This allows you to display any users public timeline assuming you have the password. To set it up for use with a project team public timeline you should create a Twitter account for the project and then follow the members of the team to see a timeline that displays tweets from each of the members.
At the bottom of this post there are links to the .wsp file which can be deployed to SharePoint using stsadm.exe and a .css file so that you can see how I chose to style the web part but obviously you could brand it any way you want.
**Update by request - more detail on deploying solutions
My solution uses Twitterlib.dll which is an open source .Net wrapper for the Twitter API and was created by the developers at Witty. This is a link to the Witty project on Google code.
Download the wsp for the Twitter web part: TwitterPublicTimeline.wsp (24 kb)
For a styling suggestion try this css: twitter.css (302.00 bytes)