Over the last several months, I've gotten into Twitter ALOT. I find it to not only be fun, but it is also an interesting social experiment. I've been surprised by how many great resources I've come across because of my followers quickly twittering something they think is cool/helpful.

Naturally, the next stage in my relationship with Twitter is to crack into its API to manipulate from my own applications. Turns out this is surprisingly easy to do. All of Twitter's functions are relatively simple and require very little to accomplish what you want to do.

So my case study was the most obvious: post an update to my "status." In ColdFusion, the entire process takes 6 lines. 6 LINES! Here they are, in all their simplistic glory:

<cfset update = "Hey, this is an update to my twitter status">
<cfhttp url="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" method="POST" charset="utf-8" username="existdissolve" password="mypassword">
    <cfhttpparam name="user" value="existdissolve" type="formfield">
    <cfhttpparam name="password" value="mypassword" type="formfield">
    <cfhttpparam name="status" value="#update#" type="formfield">
</cfhttp>

For this function, you do have to create a basic authentication, which merely requires passing your username and password along with the status message. Very simple, but very cool!

So yeah, that's about it. There's a whole slew of functions in Twitter's API, but hopefully this shows how ridiculously easy it is to get beneath the covers of Twitter's engine to use it in your own applications.

Oh, yeah, be sure to follow me on Twitter!!