In preparation of our slot at Basta 2009! we were thinking about a neat custom Activitiy which could be developed in a quick live coding session. The activity should be easy to understand and for demo purposes come off in a "just for fun" vibe. So, in consideration of the current hype surrounding Twitter we decided to do a tiny Twitter Action that can process Tweets, integrates TinyUrl and validates the length of the tweet.

Even if this project was done for "fun" you can still think of some realistic scenarios. Image you have a company account at Twitter and your Public Relations Manager wants to approve the tweets before they get send to your public timeline. Collect your tweets in custom SharePoint list (anybody could add items there) and let PR approve them. A workflow could then look like this:

Since tweets are supposed to be current, you can build in an escalation branch (left side) to remind the manager to approve the tweet (i.e. after 1 hour). If nothing happens, we just delete the tweet from our list because it can be considered "old".

The configuration dialog page uses default Nintex Controls (Credential Picker & Plain Text), so you can benefit from all Nintex features like item property lookups or the site credential store.

You can download the action here. It´s deployed as a Site Feature and has to be activated explicitly.
If you are interested in the PowerPoint slides from our Basta session, the slides are available here.

Note: this is not an official project. It´s not on codeplex and there is no support or any warranties.