I am happy to announce that Propeller can now speak Twitter! Twitter is a wildly popular micro-blogging platform that allows for broadcasting short (140 characters at maximum) messages to everyone in your Twitter network. Its popularity has risen sharply of late with exposure on major TV networks such as CNN, as well as with celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey. Much like our integration of the Facebook Connect platform announced a few weeks back, our Twitter features are designed to encourage new member signups by allowing accounts to be created using Twitter usernames and passwords, and to facilitate sharing of great content with your Propeller and Twitter networks. Let's take a look:

Sign in via Twitter



Clicking "Sign in with Twitter" redirects you to the Twitter web site, where you are asked to verify that you do indeed authorize Propeller to access and update your data on Twitter. The authentication protocol that allows this is called OAuth, which allows users to approve an application (in this case Propeller) to act on their behalf without sharing their password.The verification screen looks like this:



If you click "Allow", Propeller will then ask you to associate your Propeller account with this Twitter account. If you are new to Propeller, you can use this Twitter information to help you create a new Propeller account. The link (or create) screen looks like this:



And that's it! It should only take a minute to do this. Once you have connected your Twitter account to your Propeller account, you can take advantage of two great new Twitter-related features:

1. Submit story via Twitter

You can submit a story to Propeller simply by sending a direct message ("DM") to the official Propeller twitter feed, @PropellerDotCom. Your direct message should just include the URL you would like to submit to Propeller. Here's an example of a direct message that leads to a story submission:



Make sure to add @PropellerDotCom to the list of feeds that you are following, and please be patient, it can take up to an hour for your direct message to be transformed into a story post. The above direct message created a story submission looking like this:



2. Share story to Twitter

You can "Tweet" a Propeller story by using the Share Story feature on a Propeller story page. If you have associated your Twitter account with your Propeller account, you will see the following share window after clicking "Share Story":



Make sure that the "Tweet on Twitter" checkbox is checked, and click "Share It!" Clicking "Share It" will add a link to your Twitter feed that looks like this:



We are excited to invite the Twitter community to check out Propeller, as well as to offer these great authentication and sharing tools to existing Propeller members. Let us know if these features don't work for you.

Happy Twittering-
Tom (member tdrapeau)

As mentioned previously, one of the most frequent feature requests we receive at Propeller is the ability to share stories efficiently with Propeller friends. Today, I am pleased to announce that Propeller now offers a Share Story feature on all story detail pages. To share a story, go to a story's detail page by clicking the headline or the "(read more)" link. The Share Story feature is then accessible below the story summary in a toolbar, having taken the place of the "Send to Group" button.



Clicking the Share Story button launches a small screen to capture the details of your share request. As pictured below, 3 different tabs allow you to choose up to 25 groups, friends, and e-mail addresses to share with. You can add a personalized message that will appear with with share. Once you are done setting up the share, click "Share It!" If all went well, you will see a success message that fades away after a few seconds, telling you how many total recipients received it.