Update your MySpace status with Twitter

UPDATE: My Twidget can no longer access Twitter feeds and I’m in the process of getting it to work again. Could it be that Twitter is blocking it somehow?

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If you’re like me, you struggle with keeping a myriad of online services up-to-date with your latest photos, projects, and status information. I recently signed up for an account with Twitter, and I’ve been using this great service for updating my status on everything from my Facebook profile to this blog.

Sadly, MySpace doesn’t offer any way to integrate its status with Twitter, and I haven’t found any satisfactory way to do this with a third-party tool, so I decided to make my own. I’m calling my funky creation a Twidget, and you can see it in action on my MySpace profile.

In order to to implement the twidget yourself, you’ll need:

• a web host
• a Twitter account

That’s it! A web host is necessary because you’ll need to upload the twidget somewhere that MySpace (or any other web page) can access later.

Once you’ve uploaded the twidget to your web host, you can use the following code to view your Twitter feed:

<div class="twitterstatus">
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="never" allownetworking="internal" style="display: inline" data="http://www.YOUR-URL.com/twidget.swf?atomFeed=http://TWITTER_FEED_URL&amp;userName=TWITTER_USERNAME" align="middle" height="106" width="424">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never"></param>
<param name="allowNetworking" value="internal"></param>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.YOUR-URL.com/twidget.swf?atomFeed=http://TWITTER_FEED_URL&amp;userName=TWITTER_USERNAME"></param>
</object>
</div>

It might be best to copy and paste this code into a text editor to see what’s going on:

• http://www.YOUR-URL.com/twidget.swf - This is the URL where you’ve uploaded the twitdget file
• http://TWITTER_FEED_URL - This is the URL of your Twitter Atom feed. Please note that this is NOT the same as your Twitter user page (which looks like this: http://twitter.com/twitter_username). To get the URL for your Twitter feed, navigate to your Twitter user page and click the orange feed icon beside the URL in your browser.
• TWITTER_USERNAME - This is your user name on Twitter

Once you have changed all of the appropriate values, you should see a Twidget like the one below:

Once your twidget is displaying correctly, you can apply CSS styles to it in order to get it in the right position on your MySpace page. For my profile, I used the following CSS:

You may have to tweak these numbers a bit to get it in the right position on your page.

If you have any suggestions for the Twidget, please let me know in the comments!

Download the files and try it yourself: Twidget.