So, in my previous Twitter4Canvas post, I promised alternatives to the about-to-disappear Twitter hashtag widget. When someone asked about this at the Twitter Developer forum, a Twitter employee recommended using TweetDeck to create a Collection.
Well, since I had never created a Collection in Tweetdeck, I decided to give it a try. There is a very helpful step-by-step instruction page here:
About advanced TweetDeck features: Collections
And... it works! I created a Collection with some tweets from the #4WordPedagogy hashtag (a genius project that I think was started by Jesse Stommel back in 2016 and which was going again last week; that's when I first saw it), and then I successfully turned that Collection into a widget which you can see here in a Canvas Page.
Click and see: Collection: #4WordPedagogy.
If you've ever used Storify, you'll feel right at home doing this in Tweetdeck. Basically, what you do is to create a hashtag search in Tweetdeck along with a new empty Collection. You then drag-and-drop the tweets you want from the search column into the Collection column. Here's a screenshot from Tweetdeck:
That Collection column has a Twitter URL, and that Twitter URL can be used to create a Timeline widget in the new widget system.
At some point, I will write up more detailed instructions for how to do this, and for that I should probably write up some instructions about Tweetdeck. But here's the thing... it's still not clear how all the other changes to the Twitter API will affect Tweetdeck also. So, I'm going to hold off on step-by-step instructions about that; for now, I just wanted to make sure that, at least for now, you can curate a hashtag search into a Collection widget at Tweetdeck... and you can!
Whoo-hoo: just to make sure it was "live" I added a tweet to the top of the Collection... and sure enough, the widget updated in almost-real-time. As soon as I refreshed the Canvas Page, the new tweet was there at the top. :-)