jerakeen.org

created 30 November 2009 in notes tagged programming and twitter.

Dave Winer wants a programmable twitter client.

Unix had a shell language. DOS had a batch language. Lotus 1-2-3 had its macro language. Emacs is a programming tool as much as it is a text editor. We have gotten out of the habit of making programmable end-user products, but they are still just as important today as they were a couple of decades ago.

…

What if there were a relatively simple and low-power programming language built into a Twitter client that allowed power users to build their own little apps on top of Twitter.

I have a few thoughts about this. Firstly, I think the reason lots of apps don’t bother packaging a programming language any more is that programming languages are better now. The DOS batch language is horrible compared to Python. Or even Perl.

Secondly, Twitter has an API. It’s a really really easy to use API. There are clients for it in lots of languages. A unfollow-for-24-hours app would not be difficult to just write.

But more importantly, I have a programmable twitter client. Shelf already asks Twitterrific about the currently displayed tweet so it could display other data about the user. I could do this because just about every application on my preferred platform is already programmable.

created 07 July 2009 in stream tagged propaganda, tweets, twitter, us and wwiii.

Marked “WWIII Propaganda: Loose Tweets Sink Fleets” as a favourite on Flickr

http://flickr.com/photos/91303197@N00/3657942692

created 19 June 2009 in notes tagged twitter.

Yay twitter. You launch a small fun social chatter app. It falls over during WWDC, hillarity ensues. You gain an adorable downtime mascot! Next WWDC, you’re better, things stay up. Much handwaving happens about business models, never goes anywhere. Spammers arrive - you must be a real web service! Yay!

US elections happen! Major political parties use Twitter to do.. things. You start appearing in major newspapers. Every company suddenly has to have a Twitter account. Hardcore userbase grumble about how people aren’t using twitter ‘properly’, it’s just microblogging/broadcast. Noone notices them because their grumbles are buried under the firehose. You turn off some features, tweak others, there’s a little grumbling, noone actually stops using it. Future looking rosy! Though that might just be the burning servers.

Then the State Department asks you to move downtime to not clash with elections. Today, you’re a tool for Iranian propaganda.

Personal thoughts on this.

a. Twitter are a lot bigger and more important than I thought they were, apparently.

b. If I worked there, I’d be terrified.

created 10 June 2009 in notes tagged fail, twitter and useless.

as archival systems go, Twitter is beyond useless - the shift to the infinite-page ‘More’ button and the complete lack of any sort of dated archive mechanism means finding things you’ve said in the past is almost impossible

— http://notes.husk.org/post/121140032/twittering-everything

Hmmm, suggestion. Twitter is as popular as it is exactly because archiving is useless. It’s so shitty that it almost approaches an actual conversation in terms of forgetteability and deniability, and this is valuble.

Of course, it only feels like that. Things are hard to find if you’re looking for them, but not actually gone, so we have things the dangerous and nasty way round, rather than the useful-to-monkeys-with-overdeveloped-social-lobes way round. But it feels safer.

created 13 May 2009 in stream tagged jest and twitter.

New twitter: @hitherto Surely you jest. That's all twitter _do_ nowadays.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1786505317

created 14 April 2009 in links tagged oauth, patch, ruby and twitter.

Patch to the ruby oauth gem so that you can pass non-ascii parameters. This will hopefully fix the Dopplr API‘s problems with the same thing. Silly ruby.

http://github.com/mzsanford/oauth/commit/7c462a070bfe5faa...

created 23 March 2009 in stream tagged conventional wisdom, followers, networking, sausage roll and twitter.

New twitter: Eating a sausage roll has netted me another 4 twitter followers. ALL CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT NETWORKING IS WRONG. I should write a book.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1375621725

created 09 March 2009 in stream tagged tweet and twitter.

New twitter: It has occurred to me that, if you can't see @moleitau's last tweet, then _my_ last tweet is alarmingly context-free. But that's twitter.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1301345068

created 09 March 2009 in links tagged limits, mailinglist, sms and twitter.

Twitter mailing list discussion on how long twitter messages actually are - 140 characters? 140 bytes? Which encoding? Are HTML entities escaped? The answers appear to vary based on where the message has got to through the caching system. Crazy.

To me, it seems that the 140 character limit derives from SMS message length, so obviously should follow the same rules as SMS messages do. But I don’t expect that those rules are actually written down anywhere.

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/b...

created 05 February 2009 in stream tagged armitage, burgess, confirmed speakers, debug, debugging, ganly, gnu scientific library, julian, lightning talks, lowis, matt patterson, pomfret, roland, ruby, slides, swingler, transitioning, twit, twitter and xmpp and is geotagged

I will be attending London Ruby User Group (LRUG) February 2009 Meeting on Monday February 09

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1504505/

created 17 October 2008 in links tagged socialnetworks and twitter.

Track people who unfollow you on twitter, and why. Beautiful page, scary concept. And I like the example.

http://useqwitter.com/

created 02 October 2008 in stream tagged twitter.

New twitter: @lrakoto Quite right. Fixed.

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/943001107

created 19 September 2008 in links tagged macos, preferences, software, twitter and twitterific.

poweruser preferences for twitterific, including client-side filtering of tweets. Useful for talk-like-a-clown-day.

http://www.marusin.com/2008/02/12/setting-twitterific-pow...

created 18 August 2008 in notes tagged apple, byline, iphone, offline, rss, software, twitter and twitterrific.

I should write up ‘things learned from taking only an iPhone to the middle of nowhere where there’s no internet access‘. One of those things was, I really want a ‘that worked’ for updating my twitter status using Twitterrific. And anything else that does a write over the network.

Avoid notifying users of success.

If a read operation fails, meh. But if I just wrote a twitter update, and it doesn’t go through, I want to know. Twitter might fail, the app might fail, the connection might fail. I want success notification, rather than 1 minute of waiting for a failure message that might not arrive. THIS IS NOT A NORMAL SITUATION. But nevertheless. Maybe the rule should be ‘avoid notifying users of success where success is expected‘.

Another useful app - Byline is great when there’s wobbly bandwidth - usable even when the only connection is a spotty non-edge GSM link. Admittedly, you have to just put the phone down somewhere with a connection for 10 minutes while it slurps. But things stay slurped. It’ll pull the associated images of RSS items too, so I can look at my Flickr feeds easily.

It’s got disadvantages - you have to switch to Google Reader to read your feeds for a start. In the absence of a local Mac GUI client to rival NetNewsWire, this is painful (Fluid helps). And Byline doesn’t do ‘folders’ (tags? what does google reader call them? I’m new to this), so you just get a big flat list of unread items, which could be annoying if you subscribe to lots of feeds. I’ve recently gone through a grand purge of all my feeds and mailing lists, so my traffic levels are pretty controllable.

Except that my Economist subscription feeds did their weekly ‘the magazine shipped’ thing, and dumped 90 unread items in the list. And these are unread items that are interesting and might need reading. Unlike with the iPhone NNW client, I can’t selectively drop subscriptions from being visible on the phone - it’s all or nothing here, and Byline loads only 25 (I think) entries at a time for off-line reading. The Economist provides only a partial feed, so I had to sit where there was bandwidth and go through them in batches, ‘starring’ the ones that looked interesting then hitting ‘fetch more’ and waiting. Once I’d done this, and it didn’t take too long, the experience was great - I had the full content of the Economist articles synched locally for convenient reading (and the Economist has a nice one-narrow-column layout that lends itself well to iPhone reading).

created 15 July 2008 in notes tagged twitter.

This morning I had to page back twice on twitter.com to read all the tweets that had come in overnight. I don’t normally do this, normally I just read whatever twiteriffic gives me, and ignore everything else, but I was looking for a specific one. But am I expected to have read them? Are people going to assume that I’ve seen everything they’ve twitered? I do enough catching up in the mornings already without having to remember what the most recent twitter I’ve seen was and paging back till I see it.

created 07 April 2008 in links tagged stupidity and twitter.

An exercise in self-referential stupidity.

http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=%22tweets+for+today%22+t...

created 09 November 2007 in links tagged fail and twitter.

Awesome windows mobile failure mode? Looks like UTF16.

http://twitter.com/cubicgarden/statuses/400801592