I just added a new business rules action which lets Helpstream push real-time updates to external systems.  One example of this is to push real-time updates from Helpstream to Twitter - for example, whenever a new post is made in the Community, or a new Case is open or resolved.  Of course, Helpstream has its own "subscribe" features, but if you want people to be able to "follow" your Helpstream workspace on Twitter, with whatever events please you, this is now possible!

It's simple really - for the new 'Http or Https request' action, enter expressions for the URL, method, content-type, body, and optionally user name and password (for HTTP Basic Auth).  To integrate with Twitter, for example, posting an update with a case summary, you would enter

url - 'https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=New+case:++' + urlEncode($summary)

method - 'POST'

user - 'myusername@company.com'

password - 'twitterpassword'

This  will post a "New case:  [case summary]' message to Twitter, as real-time as possible.  If real-time is not possible due to current load, the update should happen within a minute or so.

Twitter has a simple REST api, with HTTP basic authentication, so it can all happen in one request.  For other systems, at worst you'd have to host a web page (PHP, Java servlet, etc.), and have that act as a proxy that converted the request into whatever was needed.