Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Hi all! I've been working furiously on ThinkTank over at Expert Labs for about six weeks now. Once in awhile I'll post an update on where we're at with the project. This is such an update, and it's cross-posted from the Expert Labs blog.
ThinkTank development has been going strong, but we need your help. If you're a ThinkTank tester and/or a web developer, join the mailing list, fork the code, install ThinkTank on your server, and help us build the software and documentation. If you don't know what you can do or where to start, here are the three main priorities for ThinkTank right now:
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My Projects Twitter List · Recently someone asked me how many Twitter accounts I have. The answer is four. Four! Yes, I tweet. A lot. For different projects and purposes. If you care, here's a Twitter list of all my accounts. · 3 weeks ago
Free Cloud Backup at Backupify (Till January 31st) · Cloud data backup service, Backupify, has dropped its paywall until January 31st in an effort to acquire more customers. The service backs up Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, WordPress, Delicious, and FriendFeed data, to name a few, though apparently the file format you get when you restore your data may not be the most useful to non-programmers (i.e., XML documents). I haven't tried Backupify myself, but this offer is tempting. ZDNet's Between the Lines blog has the full story: Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. · December 22nd, 2009, 5 comments
Year-End To-do: Audit Your Email Account Security · Two stories of online account break-ins this week: First, Twitter.com got redirected to an Iranian hacker page because attackers were able to get into the email account registered with their site DNS service. Second, savvy blogger Amit Agarwal's Gmail and Google Apps accounts were taken over because the attacker got access to Amit's secondary email address and sent a password change request there to get into the accounts. Do yourself a favor: Before 2010 is upon us, do a quick audit of all your most important accounts. Make sure your passwords are strong and remember: Never use inactive webmail as your secondary email account. · December 19th, 2009
In addition to geolocation, Twitter's about to launch their new lists feature, which lets you organize the people you follow into lists and see what lists others have included you on.
For example, I can create a list called "Lifehacker editors" or "Co-workers" or "NYC pals" or "Sci-Fi experts", and view tweets just from those people in a list view. I've been making lists of people I follow using TweetDeck for some time now. However, having this baked into the Twitter web site and API makes it more convenient and easy to share. Here are some screenshots of how it works from the beta.
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Robert Scoble argues that requiring users to post their true location in geolocation apps is an "antifeature" because it freaks people out. Users want control over where they say they are and want the option to be "fuzzy" about it--for instance, say they're in San Diego versus a specific neighborhood or street. For instance, Scoble checks into the Ritz hotel near his home on Foursquare when he's home. He writes:
One part of a location-based game is presenting people as you’d like others to see you. It’s a lot more interesting to check in at the Ritz every night than my actual home address, which, to tell you the truth, I’d be a little freaked out to report to everyone (and if I’m freaked out, imagine how freaked out the average user is).
I agree with Scoble wholeheartedly. I always say I live "in San Diego," which is true, but also comfortably vague. A quick, unscientific poll I ran on Twitter (which you can vote on here) shows that many are freaked out by geolocation features in general.
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Twitter's new geolocation support was supposed to launch for developers at today's Twitter Conference in LA (which I'm attending), but it wasn't quite ready yet. Still, Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver announced several details about how it will work, at least initially, in a developer session. In quickly-jotted bullet points:
- Twitter will soon be able to store location data--that is, latitude and longitude coordinates--on a per-tweet basis, and for your user profile.
- Including location information in your tweets will be opt-in only. You will have to visit your Twitter account's settings page on the web site to allow Twitter to store that data. It will not be enabled by default. Even if your Twitter client sends lat/log points along with your status update, if you didn't explicitly opt into including that information, Twitter will drop it at the point of entry and it will not be stored or published.
- Users won't see any new features on the Twitter web site when geo launches except for the settings page where you opt in. Twitter is giving API developers a head start to display and transmit geo data in tweets in their apps first.
- In practice, expect to see your Twitter client include a checkbox below the posting area labeled something like "include my location with this tweet." If you check the box when you send a tweet but you haven't given Twitter permission to store your location data, you'll have to visit your settings page on the web site to do so.
- Interesting: Twitter will scrub geo-data stored in tweets more than 14 days old to avoid subpoenas about a user's location. They will outright delete the location information from their database, not just anonymize it.
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A friend complained to me that after only two years, she had to replace her laptop's battery because it wouldn't hold a charge. I found myself telling her that she shouldn't keep her notebook computer plugged in continuously, because it would kill the battery faster. Then I stopped myself: Was this just outdated geek lore rendered obsolete by modern batteries?
Yes and no. It depends, of course, on what kind of battery you have. Battery technology has come a long way over the years, and surely in 2009 you don't have to worry about how long your laptop's been plugged in. However, one major notebook manufacturer (which ships Lithium-ion batteries) thinks you should, and suggests adding a reminder to your calendar to deplete and recharge your battery once a month. To quote: "Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time."
My friend, however, has a two-year-old Dell. Cursory Googling for her model didn't turn up the equivalent of Apple's definitive statement, only lots of opinions which ranged from "it's a non-issue" to "yes, it kills batteries!" Dell.com's battery recommendations page doesn't say anything about not keeping your notebook plugged in. HP's battery tips page doesn't answer the question, either. I pored through my wife's ASUS Eee PC user guide and didn't find any warning about continuous charging. A non-mention might make you think it's a non-problem, but if this is an issue for Apple notebook batteries, it is for PC notebooks with lithium-based batteries too. When I asked, my Twitter followers returned mixed replies, but many notebook users (both Mac and PC) DID report anecdotal battery problems when the machine was plugged in constantly.
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Update, January 2010: Twitalytic has been renamed ThinkTank.
Been hacking away at a personal programming project, tentatively named Twitalytic, a web application that archives your tweets and mentions and gives you useful data about your friends and followers on Twitter. (Here's some background on why the heck I'd ever want to archive the ephemeral chatter that is on the Twitter.)
Anyway, after a few months I've collected a teensy bit of data, so I wanted to make sharing replies to my lazyweb tweets easier. To that end, today I added a public face to the app. Here's the Twitalytic public timeline, which lists my most recent tweets and the number of replies each has. Click on the reply total to drill down into the responses to a particular tweet, like my tweet asking what people eat first thing in the morning. (Ha, I made over 200 people Twitter about breakfast!)
That listing is the most basic thing Twitalytic can do. When you set it up and log into the app, you can curate replies and see other views of your data, like your least likely followers, your least and most active friends, your most replied-to tweets and more. For each of your friends or followers, you can see mutual friends, conversations you've had, and even what Twitter client that person uses most. If you're approaching the 3,200 tweet mark, Twitalytic will also back up your tweets and let you export them into a simple text file. Here are some screenshots of the internal, logged-in only views.
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Cloud computing lets you store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Next time your favorite web site is down or you're locked out of an account, make sure you've got the crucial info you need where you can get to it: on your computer.
"But I don't need backup if my data's in the cloud," you say. "Big companies with lots of servers are better at backup than little old me could ever be." That's true, but cloud computing does come with risks. Depending on an external service to host, update, and maintain the software you love and the data you need is both the cloud's advantage and disadvantage: you're putting your stuff on computers you don't control at a single point of access (or failure). Companies get shut down or bought, accounts get locked up, servers (and you) go offline. If you store your email, photos, documents, contacts, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud, safeguard your data for when a storm's a-brewing with these handy tools.
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How Twitter Got Hacked · TechCrunch runs down step-by-step exactly how a hacker broke into Twitter employees' accounts and gained access to over 310 confidential company documents (and generally caused them hell). Lesson to be learned: Use strong passwords (and DIFFERENT passwords for every service you use), change them often, and use impossible-to-guess secret questions and answers. I recommend (and use) KeePass for helping you do just this. · July 20th, 2009, 7 comments
What I love most about my friend Penelope Trunk's Twitter feed (and all her writing) is that it's raw, personal, and hilarious. But I imagine getting served with legal documents that involve a printout of it wasn't so hilarious.
Once you've amassed enough of a following, one of the best uses of hot social networking app Twitter is getting instant answers to any question on your mind. When you post a question on Twitter and get a dozen replies within the next 10 minutes from live humans--some of whom you know and trust--it's waaayyy better than impersonal and sometimes out-of-date Google search results.
After two years and 1,700 updates on Twitter, this insta-Q&A is my favorite use of the service. The only problem is, I always want to archive and share what I learn from my followers on my blog, and it's not easy. My post on what people love and hate about netbooks, sourced entirely from Twitter replies, took me hours to compile manually, because Twitter doesn't easily list replies to a particular "tweet" in a very readable or republishable format. So this weekend I dug into the service's API to make that happen. Using Kevin Makice's new book, Twitter API: Up and Running, after just a day of coding I had my entire Twitter archive plus replies ready for viewing and publishing. While the code itself isn't ready for sharing, a few questions and subsequent replies posted on Twitter and compiled here recently include:
Update: I've posted a pre-alpha, nerds-only version on GitHub, tentatively named Twitalytic, called ThinkTank.
Of course, I included only replies from Twitter users whose updates are public, and I didn't include direct messages (because, by nature, they are private). I hope to post more lists of curated public replies going forward; I'll file future posts under "Twitter Q&A." Let me know how I can make posts like these more useful and readable.
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