Birdhouse Feature Guide

Here’s a more detailed guide to the features that Birdhouse currently offers. If you have questions, please post them in our community forum. You can also request features.

1) Manage multiple Twitter accounts

Process multiple Twitter accounts. You may need to adjust the timing of cron jobs and the capacity of your server if you plan to do a lot of data collection. Birdhouse should easily process a handful of accounts in the typical installation or more with tuning.

2) Support for the Twitter REST API and User Streaming API

Streaming API supports only one user account but you can combine processing with the stream and REST accounts to process additional accounts.

In addition to the real time streaming and regular polling of the REST API, you can initiate background tasks using the action menu:

3) Syncing and browsing the home timeline, user timeline, mentions, favorites

All the data from these will be available locally in your database to operate on or browse through the web user interface. Birdhouse is oriented towards capturing the data in MySQL so you can operate on it, it’s not meant to be a web-based Twitter client. For example, if you ever wanted to port your tweets to another service such as pump.io, could begin with Birdhouse.

4) Archive favorites to Pocket and remove them on Twitter for privacy

Birdhouse can migrate your Twitter favorites to Pocket and optionally delete them from Twitter afterwards. One nice aspect to this is that it can help protect the privacy of your Favorites. Twitter leaves all of your Favorites open to public viewing.

5) Syncing and browsing friends and followers, including their follow counts and Klout scores

Birdhouse can show your friends (people you follow) and followers sorted by their influence rankings e.g. their Followers count or their Klout score.

6) Managing Lists

Twitter’s user interface for lists is very poor. Birdhouse can synchronize the lists you own, let you create new lists, browse members and most importantly makes it easy to import groups of Twitter users to add to a list.

7) Five Types of Scheduling Tweets

Birdhouse lets you post tweets immediately or scheduled at a specific date and time. It also has three types of recurring tweets. 1) Echoing tweets so that they repeat frequently through the day, week or month or 2) posting tweets that recur every number of hours or days and 3) Recurring tweets from a group of tweets. Birdhouse also offers interval randomization as well.

You can create a group of tweets and Birdhouse will post tweets selected from the group on a similar scheduled basis:

8) Publish Tweet Storms

Birdhouse can publish groups of tweets as numbered sequences with a summary webpage:

9) Auto-deletion of older tweets older than a certain time range e.g. 30 days

If you prefer to auto-delete your older tweets, Birdhouse will regularly cleanse older ones from your account.

Visit Accounts, then click update properties for the Twitter account you wish to manage in order to set up auto-deletion and auto-archiving of Favorites.

10) Collects email addresses from the bios of your friends and followers.

Birdhouse scans the bios of your friends and followers to catalog published email addresses.