Twiliog – A Resource to Collaboratively Learn Twilio APIs through Blog Posts and Feedback

A website to connect Twilio developers through blog posts

Twiliog is a website for Twilio bloggers, developers, students, and enthusiasts to explore Twilio APIs. It serves as a resource to help programmers solve complex problems by reviewing Twilio blog posts. The blog posts include sample apps, and exchange ideas about popular Twilio channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, Chat apps, Email, and others, so programmers can work as a collaborative global team who can tune in for sample solutions, ideas, and more.

Real-World Use Cases

Most websites, such as Stack Overflow and the Twilio Blog, are disjoint. Stack Overflow is a great forum to ask questions. However, it can't comment directly on the source or solution a programmer is referencing. Similar challenges exist with the Twilio Blog – we can't directly chat with the author when a solution needs to be updated. (Also, managing users' data in a local database takes a lot of work!)

To prove out a solution to this problem, we’re using Google Firebase for a set of hosting services for any application. It offers NoSQL and real-time hosting of databases, content, social authentication, notifications, and services, such as a real-time communication server in the cloud.  

This website we are building provides these solutions to solve all these complex challenges:

• Twiliog is a website that contains blog posts on the Twilio Suite of APIs.
• Each blog post is unique and associated with a particular Twilio API, allowing users to rate, comment on, and favorite the post.
• Content authors need to authenticate into the system using Twilio Verify.
• Through Twilio Verify, 2FA codes are received through SMS, Email, Voice, or other channels.
• Google Firebase stores all the authors' and users' information, and acts as backend storage to keep all the user information.
• If programmers have challenges building their local solution, they can use the group chat solution powered by our Conversations API to discuss possible solutions.
• They can also post questions or comments in the comment section and favorite a few blog posts that would aid them in the implementation phase.
• Connecting Twilio Segment to the Twiliog website allows us to identify and track user interest and visits to the types of posts.
• Based on the data collected through Segment, Twilio Engage can power those re-engagements through SMS, SendGrid, WhatsApp, and other channels.

Statistics

According to Stackshare, nearly 3000 companies use Firebase, and we can bring these companies to use Twilio for one of the products listed above. And Stack Overflow has around 20 million registered users.

Our website has the potential to overcome the limitations of other solutions and unlock many great solutions. We can enhance and extend the usefulness of the helpful sites in the development space.

Twilio Suite of Products

• Twilio SMS
  • Twilio makes sending and receiving SMS straightforward. We'll handle the complexity of mobile carriers and global regulations. For more details, refer to our documentation.
• Verify
  • Add seamless two-factor authentication to your onboarding and login flow with a single API that does the work of a full one-time password (OTP) delivery solution.
• Google Firebase
  • Firebase is a mobile app platform with integrated, unified client libraries in various mobile programming languages. Firebase’s backend-as-a-service (BaaS) features help you develop high-quality apps, grow your user base, and handle the implementations seamlessly.
• Twilio SendGrid
  • Email is the backbone of your customer engagement. The Twilio SendGrid Email API gives you the flexibility to turn your ideas into reality and the support to scale them into production.
• Segment
  • Empower every team with good data. Segment collects events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company.
• Engage
  • Twilio Engage is the customer engagement solution that uniquely captures first-party customer data in realtime that you can activate into personalized campaigns on any channel. Then manage and measure it all through a single platform to grow customer lifetime value.
• Conversations
  • Twilio Conversations is an omnichannel messaging platform that allows you to build engaging conversational messaging experiences across many channels.
• Twilio WhatsApp
  • Twilio WhatsApp is a messaging platform provided by Twilio that allows you to communicate with customers via WhatsApp. You can send and receive messages, images, and other media on the WhatsApp platform using Twilio's APIs.

User Journey Diagram

Users who interact with Twiliog – from just learning about the site to increasing their engagement – use the products described above. The following user journey diagram shows the entire process and the actions, components, and products involved at each stage.

The goal of Twiliog is to be an end-to-end website built on Twilio products that allow users to learn about those products. The collaboration between blog authors, product experts, programmers, and builders in this environment will foster creativity and problem-solving so we can all build great customer experiences together.

Up Next

We will be publishing a set of blog posts about how we are building Twiliog. Check out these posts to see how we do it:

• Part 1: How to use the Twilio Verify API with Firebase and React Redux
• Part 2: Email Notifications with Twilio SendGrid and Firebase Functions

Pooja Srinath is a Principal Solutions Engineer at Twilio. She's focused on learning new software technologies that help create solutions, address use cases, and build apps to solve some of the industry's most challenging requirements. Pooja uses Twilio's powerful communication tools & APIs to build these ideas. She can be found at psrinath [at] twilio.com.

Yi Tang is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Twilio. She loves helping Twilio's customers achieve their business goals and is always looking for ways to improve and optimize their use of Twilio products. She can be found at ytang [at] twilio.com