ThinkTank is a free installable web application that lets you capture the insights and expertise of your social network by collecting and organizing replies to your conversations on Twitter, Facebook and (soon!) other networks. See screenshots and more at http://thinktankapp.com.

ThinkTank is sponsored by Expert Labs, led by Gina Trapani, and used to be named Twitalytic.

WARNING: Pre-alpha code, PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

This is not production code. This is a pre-alpha web application. The intended audience is server administrators with experience installing and troubleshooting PHP/MySQL hosted web applications. While ThinkTank uses OAuth to access Twitter, the webapp’s login is not as secure as it should be. Right now this code is for experimentation and tinkering only. Do not run on a public, production server. You have been warned.

In future versions, this will get easier.

• PHP 5 with cURL and GD enabled
• MySQL 5
• A public web server. (Twitter authorization requires a public callback URL, so you’ll need to expose a local dev server to the internet for initial authorization; after that the server doesn’t have to be publicly available.)

• Download source code. Save the thinktank directory one level above your web site’s DocumentRoot. For example, if your site’s DocumentRoot is
  /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/
  Put the thinktank directory here:
  /var/www/vhosts/example.com/thinktank/
• Create a symbolic link to the thinktank/webapp directory in your site’s DocumentRoot folder. To do so, cd to the DocumentRoot, and use the command:
  ln -s ../thinktank/webapp/ thinktank
• Make the following directories writable by the web server:
  thinktank/webapp/templates_c/
thinktank/webapp/templates_c/cache/
thinktank/logs/
• Note for upgraders: If you’re upgrading a previous installation, delete your cookies (in Firefox under Preferences / Privacy / delete individual cookies).

• Create a database and select it, i.e., CREATE DATABASE thinktank
• Build tables with thinktank/sql/build-db_mysql.sql

• Rename thinktank/webapp/config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php and set the appropriate application, database, and plugin values for your environment and plugins.

• Log into Twitter and register your ThinkTank instance. Set the callback URL to
  http://yourserver.com/path-to-thinktank-webapp/account/oauth.php
  Write down the items labeled “Consumer key” and “Consumer secret” and add them to the config.inc.php file.

• Create a new Facebook Application and set the Connect URL to http://yourserver.com/path-to-thinktank-webapp/account/ and the Post-Remove and Post-Authorize URLs to http://yourserver.com/path-to-thinktank-webapp/account/?p=facebook.
• Write down your API Key and Application Secret, and enter those values into the config.inc.php file.

• Add the appropriate API keys for each service in your config.inc.php file.

Visit the web application on your server, register and log in. On the Plugins page, activate Twitter, Facebook, and any other plugins you want. Once they’re activated, click on the plugin link and authorize your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts in ThinkTank.

Then, to run the crawler to load your social network data, cd to /your-path-to-thinktank/webapp/crawler/, and run:

$ php crawl.php [email protected] yourttpassword

Where [email protected] is your ThinkTank login email address, and yourttpassword is your ThinkTank password.

To view what’s going on with the crawler, use this command:

$ tail -f /your-path-to-thinkank/logs/crawler.log

Cron the crawler’s run command to go at least once an hour. Hint: you may configure and cron this pre-fab bash script, which will run the crawler and rotate its logs:

/thinktank/extras/cron/cron

See the script’s README for more information on configuring it.

To discuss ThinkTank, post to the project mailing list. For deeper documentation, see the ThinkTank wiki.

ThinkTank’s source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, except for the external libraries listed below.

• Facebook Platform PHP5 client (Included)
• SimpleTest (Included)
• Smarty (Included)
• Twitter OAuth by Abraham Williams (Included)

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