SAS Information Delivery Portal allows you to add syndicated channels (RSS feeds) to your site. There are several ways to exploit this ability. You might want to add a blog (ahem, bi-notes.com) or just have access to the latest tweets. I’ve used Twitter to make some new friends, learn about some cool links, and recently it did help me confirm it was an earthquake that nearly caused my monitor to topple over. [Follow me: @taanderud]
How would I integrate a tweet?
There are several uses I can imagine for Twitter. If your company primarily does business to business activity then you may want to create a portal page that generates all the data you have for the Top 10 customers. You could divide the page so that one side display internal information, such as graphs/tables (recent sales, customer support calls, last upgrade, etc) and on second side place external information, such as tweets or commentary from a blog. If you are already using something like this, please post in the comments so we can all learn some new ideas!
Adding Tweets to the Portal
There are several ways to have the tweets on the SAS Information Delivery Portal: add a link to a current collection, set as a bookmark, place the feed in it’s own portlet, or display the actual Twitter messages.
The first three methods are covered in the SAS docs, so let’s focus on the fourth method, which is the coolest. Create a new URL Portlet and edit the properties. For this example, I’m using the atom feed to search for #SASBIBook so I know when the topic is mentioned. The URL string is:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23SASBIBook
The %23 is the hash tag. You can append other parameters to the URL string, such as &rpp=5 to only get the last 5 posts. [Learn more about the Twitter API GET Search method and paramters]
Analyzing Tweets
John Munoz wrote this blog entry on using SAS to analyze the tweets. He provides a really excellent overview about how to tap into the stream and even provides the code to help you along. John rocks!
Tricia Aanderud is SAS BI evangelist, enthusiastic innovator & hired gun, pursuing design tips, programming tricks & other mishmashes to share. Her book Building Business Intelligence with SAS book helps new and experienced users get up to speed quickly on the SAS BI Solution. Tricia Aanderud, president of And Data, Inc., provides SAS consulting services to corporations who need assistance understanding how to transform their data into meaningful charts, reports, and dashboards. She has a background in technical writing, process engineering, and customer service. Tricia has been an enthusiastic SAS user since 2002 and has presented papers at the SAS Global Forum and other industry conferences. Tricia has a B.A. in Mass Communications from Eastern Kentucky University. She invites you to connect to her on Linked In or follow her on Twitter using one of the icons below:
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Hi Tricia,
Great article Tricia.
May I suggest to all of your smart readers out there that they get their Tweet gathering set up quickly. Every day that passes is a day of Twitter data that will be lost forever. Twitter’s API has a short memory as Twitter’s search API allows something like the most recent 3,200 Tweets or 2 weeks of history, that’s it. Anything beyond that window is ancient history to Twitter’s API.
Keep up the good work!
John:
Great suggestion as usual. I’m sure you code would help pull the data into a dataset where the user could decide how long they want to keep it.
Thanks!
Tricia
Check that off the list of tinhgs I was confused about.
Artilecs like this make life so much simpler.
I like to party, not look artcleis up online. You made it happen.