All posts tagged 'twitter'

Twitter API/Developer Meetup Notes

Mar 01 2010

Here are some notes I took during the Twitter developer meetup that was tonight, at Twitter Headquarters. They’re probably not complete, because I only took bits and pieces on my iPhone, then filled out some details when I got home. It does sound like Twitter are really trying to bulk up their efforts to support developers and let their community flourish, which is probably a great approach given their “we are a platform” strategy. Taken/formatted via ListML, thus the very-hierarchical list approach. Enjoy.

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Web Service Authentication APIs

Jan 23 2010

For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at a lot of web service authentication/verification APIs lately. I thought folks might be interested in the results. Here are the methods available for a variety of web services/applications online, with links to their appropriate docs:

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Twitter’s Missing Features

May 03 2009

I’ve been sketching some random thoughts and plans for a new Twitter client, and rather than restrict it to my notebooks and condemn it to the fate of so many other ideas of mine that never see realization, I’m putting my wish-list for what a decent Twitter client should allow me to do here. Feel free to roll these into another client and let me know so that I can just use it, rather than have to build it

Read the full list after the break

On Social Customer Support

Apr 18 2009

Through my work with Automattic, I’ve had the privilege of working with the guys over at Intense Debate. I’ve been helping them improve their WordPress plugin and get it ready for some new features. Along the way I made the blunder of releasing a version that had a pretty serious bug in it, and that triggered a lot of customer support issues/cases.

In the “old days” (or in a lot of big corporates today), those support cases would have been handled behind a corporate “veil of secrecy”, tucked in a back end system somewhere, responded to by anonymous “Customer Service Representatives” via a generic email account like “support@intensedebate.com”. While we’re also making use of a generic email address, the similarities between our approach and that of big corporates ends there. End to end, the differences are pretty stark.

Keep Reading about Social Customer Support

Twitter vs Facebook Status

Apr 09 2009

In the past few weeks I’ve been asked by at least 3 different people why they should use this new “Twitter” thing they’ve heard about, rather than just updating their status on Facebook. I think it’s a pretty valid question, so I thought I’d put together some of the reasons why I use Twitter, rather than Facebook’s Status update.

It’s Open: I’m a fan of the idea of “open” (as in open source, portable data, etc etc). Facebook is not. Twitter is. Putting my status updates through Twitter means that I can do fun things like load them into my sidebar (on the right of my blog) easily (via an RSS feed). If I updated in Facebook, those updates become useless because I can’t get them back out.
Client Apps: I don’t want to have to go to the Facebook site all the time to update my status. I can run a Twitter client (currently DestroyTwitter or TweetDeck) on my computer and update my status in a couple of key-presses. I also have options (there’s that “open” thing coming in handy again) as far as clients go, so I can pick and choose something that I like.
Be Part of Something Bigger: Facebook is great and all, but it’s owned and controlled by Facebook. It’s a world unto itself with an established set of protocols and expectations. Twitter is something new. It’s a new type of “web” as we know it. It’s “live” in a way that not much else is yet. I’d like to be a part of that, so that I can see what’s really going on, which brings me to…
Search: Twitter’s search system is a whole new ball-game. It allows you to see what’s going on and what people are thinking/doing/asking now.
Community: Twitter’s omni-directional “follow” system means that the community/network is fundamentally to Facebook’s bi-directional system. I don’t “allow” people to follow me. If they want to, they do. If they don’t, they don’t. I can reach a whole different group of people on Twitter that I am not connected to on Facebook.
Laziness: Last but not least, I have a Facebook app installed that loads my Twitter status into FB anyway, saving me the hassle of updating both

So why do you use Twitter (or Facebook Status)? Chime in on the comments and I’ll add any good ones to the list!

Idea: Comment Aggregation via WordPress

Mar 12 2009

There are lots of “conversation platforms” out there, and more arriving daily. FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader (now that it has commenting functionality); you name it. These systems are all great for getting your content out there and exposing more people to it, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it becomes really hard to follow the conversations on all of these different platforms. They all generally act as either a kind of content aggregation platform (e.g. FriendFeed/Google Reader), or as a unique content creation/delivery system, which is heavily used to redistribute existing content (e.g. Twitter). With all this aggregating going on, why not do the same thing in reverse? Mashable has just started doing something along these lines and that prompted me to finally publish this draft post.

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South by Southwest (SxSW) Virgin

Mar 12 2009

Tomorrow morning I leave to go to South by Southwest, one of the biggest festival/conferences in the tech scene (and the music and film scenes). I’ve never been before, so I’m pretty excited. There’s one main reason that I’m going, but that’s just my official excuse — I’ve wanted to go to SxSW since I first heard of it, about 3 years ago. Last year I even promised myself that I’d go this year, but then I thought I was going to be in Chile, so didn’t get tickets. Then things changed, this year rolled around, and a matter of days before it starts, I found myself with adequate motivation and reason to go, so I bought tickets.

My main reason for going?

Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny

The reason this is specifically important for me is that I was on the WordPress team that’s competing/presenting on this panel. We put a heap of work into building a website/system based on supplied specifications/designs and will go head to head with Joomla and Drupal during that panel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m also really excited to attend a bunch of other panels, and of course the parties, but this one panel is my main reason. Oh, and I get to stay and hang out with my good buddy Ray Hernandez as well, so it’s all good. I’ll try to post a summary here when I get back, but in the meantime you can follow me on Twitter for live updates on what’s happening.

Idea: Twitter API Layer for WordPress

Mar 03 2009

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Twitter Search Bookmarklet

Feb 09 2009

Throughout the day, I’m likely to search Twitter a number of times. Being the lazy person that I am, I got sick of opening a new tab, typing search.twitter.com, hitting enter, waiting for the page, then typing my term and waiting for results. I already have a couple of other bookmarklets that I use all the time (one for loading up a Google Map, one for jumping to a PHP function name in the online reference), so I figured I’d knock up something to search Twitter. I’m using Firefox on a Mac, YMMV.

Bookmark any page (seriously, any page).
Put that bookmark into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
Right click it and select Properties
Change the Name to something like “Search Twitter”

Change the Location to this (copy and paste it):

javascript:var%20d=document,w=window,e=w.getSelection,k=d.getSelection,x=d.selection,s=(e?e():(k)?k():(x?x.createRange().text:0));if(!s.length){s=prompt('Search%20Twitter:','');}if(s){document.location.href='http://search.twitter.com/search?q='+escape(s);}else{void(0);}

Save Changes

That’s it. Now click that link in your Bookmark Toolbar and it’ll prompt you for a search string. Enter anything and hit OK. If you happen to have some text on the page selected, it’ll automatically search for that text. Voila – Twitter Search.

Alternative Uses for WordPress

Jan 08 2009

WordPress, the most widely used blogging platform in the world, is built in a relatively content-agnostic way that means it’s suitable for all sorts of things, all it takes is a little bit of creativity and some theme/plugin hacking. I’ve decided to compile a list of alternative/slightly different uses for WordPress that I either see around the place, or that I come up with myself.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to actually implement all of these ideas, I’m just putting them out there.

Read on for some different applications for WordPress