Just the other day I saw a tweet from an Assembla user that said, “Just linked my new twitter account to my Assembla account. Viewers can now see commits I post on Assembla.”

If you are an Assembla user, you already know that Assembla tools are tightly integrated with an activity stream to provide real-time updates of activity within a workspace. You can customize email notifications to allow you to get real-time, hourly, or daily summaries of activity right to your inbox.

But did you know that Assembla’s Twitter Tool provides the ability to post real-time notifications of code commits, code reviews, and ticket, file, message, team, and wiki activity to Twitter? This may be a useful tool for some projects for the following reasons.

Private Projects: Post activity for team members and clients to follow.

Why not allow tech-savvy team members and developers to track project activity through Twitter? Create a Twitter account for the project that you are working on and optionally set it as protected (private) so you can approve who has access to the tweets. Then tell your client or team members that they can follow @projectname for real-time updates on project activity.

Open Source Projects: Post activity to increase awareness of your project and its progress.

If you are a part of an open source project, you have probably promoted it in though some form of social media, because social media is an ideal medium to increase participation and build a community. When you post activity such as code commits and new and updated tickets, followers can get real-time visibility into project activity. This increase in awareness can lead to more active participation from your project community. 

The Twitter Tool is optional and can be set up in seconds. Watch the video below to learn how to install and configure it in your project's space.