Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

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Twitter FTW: or how after 10,543 tweets Twitter actually came in handy

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Twitter bird by Frank ChimeroFor those who may not know, I work for Yahoo! remotely. As such, my development box is 4,795 km (2,980 miles) to the west of me. Now, this isn’t normally a problem, except for today when my box decided to stop responding. And if you don’t believe in Murphy’s Law, today was also Presidents Day in the U.S., which meant there was nobody in the office to hit the reset switch for me. Enter Twitter. After keeping myself busy with non-dev-box related work, I finally decided to send out a tweet asking for help. I wasn’t holding my breath. But then, David Calhoun came to my rescue with a tweet of his own. Let it be known that I’ve never even met him face to face, but this selfless, shining example of a human being went to my box and turned it on (turns out someone had turned it off).

Now, if that isn’t an awesome use of Twitter, then I don’t know what is. Thanks David, thanks Twitter, you made my day.★

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Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

How Twitter Could Beat Spam

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Quite simply, new accounts should not be allowed to have tweets with @replies in them show up in the streams of others, period.

The reason for this is because spammers use new accounts as throwaways from which to crawl name lists and @reply to people with links to their crap. Now, there’s a possible problem with this that my friend Sarven brought up: what if your friend joins Twitter and you want to see their @replies? Well, you could have a mechanism where a ‘trusted’ or proven account could vouch for a new one, or people could opt-in to @replies from a given account.

I know, it sucks, but we can all thank spammer scum for having to implement countermeasures to their crap.★

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Share Smarter, Not Harder: How I Feed Twitter

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I was just a kid watching DuckTales when I heard Scrooge McDuck say “work smarter, not harder” and that philosophy stuck. Maybe it’s because I’m predisposed to avoid manual labour, who knows. All I know is I’m always on the lookout to simplify process. So when it came to sharing items of interest with friends, I grew tired of manually sending links one at a time over IM. Broadcasting over Twitter was slightly better but I ran the risk of flooding people with tweets. After all, we don’t consume media one bite-sized chunk at a time in neatly spaced intervals. We get random links from friends, watch video clips two or three at a time, browse online stores full of really cool things that we want, and so on.

What to do? The solution came to me in the form of a service called Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed lets you plug a feed into your Twitter account so that any time there’s a new item in the feed, it gets Tweeted to your account. Great, but there were still some issues to overcome, such as drawing all of my points of interest into one feed and then not flooding my Twitter account with a gzillion tweets.

Step 1: The Funnel

Using a combination of YQL and Yahoo! Pipes, I pulled in my Amazon Wish List, Google Reader shared items, YouTube favourites, blog posts on my site, and Flickr favourites into one giant feed.

twitter-funnel

Step 2: Timed Release

Once Pipes gave me a consolidated feed, I was able to plug it into Twitterfeed. But I still had to make sure that Twitterfeed didn’t dump a bunch of tweets into Twitter at the same time. Luckily, Twitterfeed is customizable and I was able to tell it to release only one tweet every two hours. This way, whenever I marked several items in Google Reader as “shared” they got banked up and sent out one at a time over the course of the day.

twitterfeed

Step 3: Letting People Know it’s Automated

I came across a bit of an odd phenomenon with this technique however. People thought I never slept because I was posting tweets like clockwork at all hours. It might be fun if people think you aren’t sleeping, but it isn’t as fun when they think you aren’t working. So I added “[AutoTweet]” to the end of the tweets that Twitterfeed posted (the service allows you to prefix and suffix tweets with text). That way, people could tell right away that I didn’t manually send out the tweet.

autotweet

That’s it! I didn’t get into too much technical detail here, but if you’re interested let me know and I’ll post a much more detailed writeup.★

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Automated: “The Day The Twitter Died”

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

On Friday April 17, 2009, Oprah joined Twitter–effectively neutering Twitter of its geek niche status.

Automated by Ara Pehlivanian

Automated by Ara Pehlivanian

-★

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Introducing 140 char (or less) JavaScript programs

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Today I got tired of seeing yet another onclick="obtrusivejavascript()" in HTML so I wrote a little program in protest. What I wanted to do though was to post the program to Twitter which has a 140 character limit so it was mildly challenging. Here it is:

Fully expanded:

var elems = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
for (var i = 0; elems[i]; i += 1) {
    if (elems[i].getAttribute("onclick")) {
        elems[i].onclick = function () {
            alert("FAIL!");
        }
    }
}

Compressed for Twitter:

var x=document.getElementsByTagName("*");for (var i=0;x[i];i++){if (x[i].getAttribute("onclick")){x[i].onclick=function(){alert("FAIL!");}}}

I invite you to continue the trend. Write 140 character (or less) JavaScript programs and post them to Twitter then post a link here in the comments. If the trend grows, I’ll build a small site to host the activity.

I’ll go first!★

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Posted in General | 6 Comments »

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