TweetPrez is a tool that allows one to create presentations with phrases that are automatically tweeted to the presenter timeline.

The idea behind TweetPrez is that nobody reads long bullet based slides. You have a better chance of getting your message understood by the audience if you use small sentences with your key messages. Sending these messages to Twitter allows your followers to “see” the presentation if they are not in the room. It also makes it easier for the audience to retweet your key points.

This tool was created as an experiment and, although it works, is at its very early stages. The code certainly need lots of work and refactoring. Consider that this was done over a weekend :-)

The current version of TweetPrez supports the following features:

  • A user interface to edit the presentation timeline, i.e., the sentences that you will use in your presentation;
  • Automatically detects when a link to an image is inserted in the sentence and renders it;
  • Automatically detects when there is a link to a YouTube embeddable video in the sentence and plays it;
  • Allows to upload a local video that will be played with your sentence, but the link to the video will not be shared with your tweet. Useful in case you want to show a video in the presentation but don’t want to publish it on YouTube;
  • Shows the previous tweet in the next slide, so the audience can actually see you tweeted;
  • Allows to choose which sentences you want to send to Twitter or not.

But, the current version has also a some drawbacks:

  • Although it is a web application, it is not multi-tenant yet! This means that it will work for only one user at a time. We should make a user login later to better handle multi-tenancy in the future;
  • When you run TweetPrez for the first time, it will connect to your Twitter account and save a file called “access.token” in the current folder. This is the key to access your timeline. If you want to use TweetPrez with another Twitter account, you have to manually delete this file;
  • You can’t reorder timeline items. So, think first and type later;
  • This was tested only on Firefox 5, on a MacOSX. We are not sure if it will work properly in other browsers;
  • The screen dimensions were set for a 1280 x 800 screen. We don’t know how it would play in different resolutions.

How to use it:

  • First, you need to install Maven
  • Download the source code from our Subversion repository, using user guest, password guest:
svn co https://helpdesk.toolscloud.net/opensource/tweetprez/
  • Then, create a file called twitter.properties at the tweetprez root folder (the same folder where you can find the src folder). Put the following in this file:
consumerKey=<A KEY>
consumerSecret=<A SECRET>

you can get the values for these two properties by registering your application on Twitter. When you do that, don’t forget to request permission to update the user timeline, otherwise TweetPrez won’t be able to tweet your presentation. When you register your application, Twitter will send you a consumer key and a consumer secret. Add these to the twitter.properties file.

  • Then, you can start TweetPrez using the Maven jetty plugin. Just run, in the TweetPrez folder:
mvn jetty:run
  • The rest is pretty much straightforward. Just follow the screen instructions and you should be fine.

We know that this tool could use a lot of improvement, so, if you want to collaborate, just send us your patch! You can contact us at tweetprez@toolscloud.com.

Screenshots: