Hands on: Windows Phone Mango Twitter integration [video]

By Tom Warren, on 27th Jul 11 6:35 pm with 54 Comments

Microsoft’s latest developer beta of Windows Phone Mango includes the highly anticipated Twitter integration.

The integration is present in the me tile, picture and browser sharing and the people hub. The notifications section in the me tile will now show you alerts when people mention you in a tweet or @ reply to you. Perhaps the most impressive part is the integration in the people hub. Twitter feeds and at replies will be visible straight from the people hub. Microsoft has also built a filter into the People Hub to allow people to filter out feeds from Facebook, Windows Live and Twitter.

The setup process for Twitter in Windows Phone Mango is simple and quick. Microsoft presents a twitter page to allow users to simply authorize Windows Live to interact with your Twitter account. Tweeted messages appear as “Via WindowsLive” which links to windowsphone.com and images are uploaded and shared from Microsoft’s SkyDrive site. For a full hands on please see the video below.

  • Anonymous

    I can hear your password!!! :P

    • Guest

      LOL

  • http://twitter.com/TechDudeGeorge George S

    Aww, I really want a WP7 phone but 2 reasons are stopping me.
    1. There are none on PAYG under £200 that I can find, I wish they’d make smaller ones like they have smaller Android phones.
    2. The apps are way too expensive than they are on iOS and Android.

    • Anonymous

      Those are inexcusable excuses… Android is android, has no requirements for hardware so you’re going to have a laggy experience at prices below (and some above) that. 

      With the apps, I think if you bought yourself 50 paid apps at $1.99 average, you’re looking at $100 and lets assume you paid $20 bucks more. Is $20 bucks not worth you being HAPPY with a phone?

    • LWSJR

      Well….He is looking for a paygo device, affordably priced, as a contract does not seem feasible.   Sounds like a valid reason preventing George S from getting a WP device.

    • Anonymous

      buy one from amazon.de

    • President Baltar

      Buy a used one :)

    • http://twitter.com/tonycubed Tony

      I might get slapped for this, but, you can get a HD2 for £150 on Play.com (at least it was when I last checked), this can run WM 6.5 (which it ships with), but after a little playing around, you can get WP7 on it, Android, Ubuntu and so on.

      The WP7 experience isn’t perfect, but if you don’t like WP7, at least you’ll have Android (which runs great on it) :P

    • CandidCalum

      I’d hate to have Android after seeing how awesome Windows Phone is (and using it, but obviously this user hasn’t had the joy of using Windows Phone as his regular phone yet).

    • http://twitter.com/tonycubed Tony

      I can switch between WP7 (installed via NAND) and boot into Android (via SD Card), WP7 is great, but I’ll really give it ago when Mango gets ported over.  After all, there is nothing wrong with choice.  Android wouldn’t spoil the experience because it’ll be on there as a choice, not that you’d be stuck with it.

    • http://www.facebook.com/stuartch Stuart C Hutchinson

      Expansys are doing a deal on unlocked HTC 7 Pros for only £229. ( http://www.expansys.com/htc-7-pro-207989/?ico=hpage&icl=HH&icc=Price ) That’s an outstanding deal on a great phone but I guess I can’t help if your deadly serious that you don’t wanna pay even a little over £200, just trying to help as all. 

    • tim.griffiths

      Your first point I agree with, the second though is a completely different story.

      The apps do cost more but they still don’t cost a lot. If your at the level where your buying enough apps to make them expensive then to me that indicates the apps arn’t really that good.

      I would personally prefer to see developers spend more time on one app to make it really really good, rather than making lot’s of 79p apps. Unfortunetly it’s not possible just to make one really good 79p app because the sales volume increase is never big enough to pay for the extra time.

    • Mervin

      Get one on ebay, got an Omnia 7 and HD7 for £200 each shipped over, unlocked and have been using it since March without any problems.  Make sure you get it from reputable seller.

  • Anonymous

    Works like a charm. The New Beta even has a bit more of a polished feel throughout the OS and Apps. 

    I am hoping we can either get the official release outside of carriers similar to the way we got the Beta, or that we will actually get a official update from the beta version since so far it has worked smoother than silk. 

    If we still have to go through carriers, hopefully this time it won’t take months in testing for the people who had the extreme wait. 

  • http://twitter.com/efjay01 Ef Jay

    Looks good, but do you get any audio notifications for mentions or new tweets?

    • http://www.winrumors.com Tom W

      no, this is managed by the live me tile.

    • http://twitter.com/efjay01 Ef Jay

      Ok, thanks.

    • 1jaxstate1

      And the live Me tile doesn’t update quickly. It’s doesn’t seem to be push. I got a @ message. It displayed on the Me tile, then got two more @ messages, and the first didn’t clear for 30 minutes, and the othe @ messages didn’t show at all. It’s a beta, so eh.

    • Entegy

      You can do a manual refresh by holding down your finger on the notifications list.

    • Anonymous

      I’m saying the ME tile doesn’t update as it should. No reason to go checking notifications if I’m being told there are none by the Me tile.

  • Bill Gates

    We are the best

  • http://josedmorales.net Josè Daniel

    Holy cow! I didn’t know about the share function on IE9 and from the pictures themselves !!!

  • http://www.facebook.com/noe.brito Noe Brito

    Very nice Tom!

  • http://twitter.com/Koki_v3 Koki_v3

    Is it just me or ar the animations when opening different hubs a little diferent too? Never noticed this in any Mango vids until now in this one.

    • Anonymous

      Yep, they changed it a bit in this beta.

    • Anonymous

      Yes, all the hubs now use a new and consistent animation.

  • Mikee

    So stoked on this. 

  • CandidCalum

    Has anyone managed to set it so their Twitter contacts show in the contact list? There appears to be a way according to the settings of the People hub. In the ‘filter my contact list’ section, Twitter is an option; checking and unchecking this has no effect on the ‘What’s new’ feed, so I imagine (and hope) it’s a way for us to show our Twitter contacts in the contact list. It might simply be disabled on this build, but I thought it’s worth a check with others.

    • Lee Mirowitz

      This is a serious problem I can’t figure out too! I would like to have my friend’s profiles to be linked with Twitter like it is with facebook, and I don’t see what’s stopping Microsoft from doing so…

    • CandidCalum

      That’s also what I’d like. It might be like that in the RTM build. We can hope :) If it isn’t like that, I’ll be very disappointed.

    • Anonymous

      Can you try and make a new ‘Group’ in Mango and see if the ‘what’s new’ feed for that group only includes twitter messages from people in that group?

      My guess is there is no integration between twitter contacts and wp7 contacts

    • CandidCalum

      I’ve just tried that, and unfortunately you appear to be right :( I hope this has changed in the RTM build. The ‘filter my contact list’ settings of the People hub give me hope.

    • Anonymous
    • Candid Calum

      Thanks for letting me know. Microsoft should implement a way to make it easier and more obvious for people to link their Facebook contacts with their respective Twitter, LinkedIn, and Windows Live accounts because it would take a while for some of us to go through all of our contacts just to link them. I’m also very disappointed there doesn’t appear to be a way for us to store Facebook Pages and other Twitter profiles we’re following in our contact list because I’d like to create groups for things like technology news, Microsoft news as a replacement for using an RSS reader. Not only that, but I’d just like to be able to easily and quickly access Pages’s updates as well as my other contacts’ updates.

    • Jopierce

      No. I actually think twitter integration is incomplete in 7712.There’s still no way to link contacts to their twitter accounts. I was also surprised that there were no SMS style notifications for @ mentions. I have a feeling those features are coming by 7720. All in all 7712 is faster than 7610 and definitely feels more polished.

    • Jopierce

      No. I actually think twitter integration is incomplete in 7712.There’s still no way to link contacts to their twitter accounts. I was also surprised that there were no SMS style notifications for @ mentions. I have a feeling those features are coming by 7720. All in all 7712 is faster than 7610 and definitely feels more polished.

    • Jopierce

      No. I actually think twitter integration is incomplete in 7712.There’s still no way to link contacts to their twitter accounts. I was also surprised that there were no SMS style notifications for @ mentions. I have a feeling those features are coming by 7720. All in all 7712 is faster than 7610 and definitely feels more polished.

  • http://twitter.com/theloz Loz Lowe

    Is there any way to only show Twitter updates for people in my address book? My What’s New section is going to get flooded!

  • Anonymous

    Looks awesome!

  • Anonymous

    when sprint gets a good phone then i will sell my evo4g. battery life is bullshit!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001092279588 Damien Monize

    That looks smooth and inuitive….WANT!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001092279588 Damien Monize

    That looks smooth and inuitive….WANT!

  • phil jay

    Did you notice how smooth that just was? :D

  • Anonymous

    Sprint better bring a 4 inch, FFC, WP7 Mango phone please!!!!!

    • Anonymous

      That’s all I want from them

  • Anonymous

    I just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, GrabPenny.com

  • pary

    is the twitter integration availabe in beta build 7661? cuz mine says comming soon

    • Anonymous

      Yes. Thats what Tom is using for the video, I guess.

    • Entegy

      No, he’s using 7712 that came out today. Connect your device to Zune 4.8, there’s an update to the Mango beta waiting.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/6G3ZZJCHOLYP3S5CRCIHQ7WDSE MVIM

    There are two problems with this Twitter pictures behavior. The first is that Twitter.com does not realize that photos hosted on SkyDrive are images, as it does with TwitPic, yfrog, and others; and thus it will not show an image preview in your timeline. Instead, your followers have to know that the, otherwise nondescript, tweet is in fact linking to an image, and then your followers would also have to click the link and go off-site to see the image. That needs fixed on Twitter’s end. I wonder if/when that will happen.

    The second issue is the use of SkyDrive itself. While it is unlikely that one could individually use as much space as SkyDrive provides, it is going to become a file management nightmare because now we have Windows Phone uploading all of our images (still down-scaled, without any option to change that) to SkyDrive once when we take the picture. Now, it will duplicate anything we post to Twitter with a second upload (also down-scaled, but also using 3G data if you’re not on Wi-Fi). I’d rather not have to worry about which images I can delete off of SkyDrive for fear of breaking links in tweets. I’d rather they just give us the option to use TwitPic like everybody else.

  • http://doctorwhofan98.wordpress.com/ doctorwhofan98

    I just used a Windows Phone today for the first time running NoDo and I was amazed! Way better than any iPhone, and it works great with Hotmail.

    If that’s NoDo, I wonder how amazing Mango is going to be!!!

    Nice Twitter integration, by the way. When’s it coming to Windows Live as a Service again?

  • y0y0y0

    Hey Tom, does the me tile flip and animate the notifications you get from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn ? Like flip and animate : 2 posts , or something like that ? 

  • Anonymous

    I’m on Mango 7616 version how do i get 7712 I’m i going to receive an update msg?

  • Anonymous

    I want a Samsung Galaxy S2 with Mango on it!