Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with twitter

Which publishing tool should I use for topic-based blogging?

diogenes — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:36:33 -0800

What tool should I use for publishing extended thoughts that I want to link to from Twitter? I'd like something topic-based, with tagging, that lives in the cloud? Does such a thing exist? I'm a technical writer, and I recently discovered a thriving community of my peers on Twitter (much to my surprise). Now that I've joined the dialog, I find that I often want to say more than I can fit in 140 characters. Obviously I need a blog. I've used various tools (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) for short-lived blogs in the past, so I'm not a complete newbie to the idea.

Basically, I'm wondering what newfangled technologies are out there. I'm not even sure if what I need is a blog. I just want a way to post and organize extended thoughts. I'm starting to use topic-based tools in my technical writing, and I love the idea of building standalone bits of information that can be tagged, sorted, and rearranged. Is there anything like that for "blogging."

Good examples of Social Sign In?

slactoid — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:43:45 -0800

Any good examples of "Social Sign In"? For the little web toys I make, I don't want to make full sign up forms, so I'm looking for any sites that are using Facebook / Twitter / Google / Yahoo / OpenID / etc for sign in. Something like what stack overflow is doing here: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login (only OpenID though).

Private, self-hosted alternative to Brightkite?

merlinmann — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:39:48 -0800

Looking for a self-hosted, private alternative to Brightkite for sharing family stuff. My wife and I (mis)-use Brightkite as a two-person, location-aware version of Twitter. All our posts are private (we two are one another's only "friends"), and it's turned out to be a really handy way to let each other know where we are, indicate when we're on our way home, and even to post little snapshots of our daughter to each other through the day. Really fun and useful.

Although, we admittedly use the app "anti-socially," always trying make sure everything stays as private as it can, obviously it's an uphill battle with an app that's designed to broadcast lots of personal information to large groups of people.

Any suggestions for a more private alternative to Brightkite? Preferably something Open Source and self-hosted where we own and control as much of the data as possible. Not against API stuff interacting with Fire Eagle or what have you; as long as we maintain control over keeping everything as private as you'd want a note on your own fridge to be. Do-able?

Utilising the Twitter API

nostrich — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:39:46 -0800

Where to start: extracting images from a Twitter search and presenting them on a webpage? I have almost no programming knowledge, but I have a small project in mind, and have no idea where to start. (And also about a week to do it in, since it's a time-sensitive project.)

Here's what I want to do:
- Get the results of a Twitter search along the lines of "something something twitpic filter:links" (ie, get all the results of a search for "something something" that include a link to a Twitpic image).
- Get a thumbnail of each Twitpic image
- Present these thumbnails on a webpage

Twitter's API can do what I want, as can Twitpic's, I'm just not sure where I should start. Presumably, I need to get the tweets, perform some kind of regex voodoo to extract the Twitpic links, and borrow Twitpic's API to get thumbnails for them.

This sounds like it should be fairly easy, but I'm a guy that doesn't have fluency in any programming language, so I can't even picture what my first step would be. I'm probably approaching this a little backwards, too -- trying to consider how Twitter's API is rate-limited, and it would need some form of caching, etc, etc. (Though I can't program, I do have some basic fundamental knowledge of the concepts and idea involved, like rate-limiting and cacheing, and such.)

So where do you think I should start? Learning the basics of X programming language seems like a sensible step 1, but I don't have much interest in actually learning to program in X, just in learning to do this in X. Whatever X may be.

It doesn't really matter if I can't do this in a week, but if it took much more than a week to do, I'm not sure it would be worth the time.

What do you think?

RT @mathowie Anybody seen sites that scan cats?

anildash — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:13:48 -0800

Are there good examples of Twitter (or status updates on Facebook) being used to answer questions AskMe-style? Or even better, to collaboratively solve a problem, like when the Scooby Gang here sussed out Kaycee Nicole? Right now, all of the questions & answers I see happening via Twitter replies are mostly opinion/survey questions. While it's interesting to see if people prefer Ginger or Maryann, I'm much more curious about concrete problems being solved using these new, more immediate media. Enlighten me!

Why Should You Use Social Networking at Work?

Jaybo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:06:47 -0800

Many workplaces ban social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on. What are some of the reasons workplaces should allow (and even encourage) staff to use social networking sites? I'm particularly interested in the case you would make to someone in the healthcare field but examples that are applicable to other areas, especially those that may ban social networking site for privacy or productivity reasons, are welcome as well.

Twitter: The Followee of My Followee

Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:06:56 -0800

Twitter question: Is there a tool which will let me see who the people I follow are themselves following, in aggregate? Of course, you can see who a given person follows, but so far as I know, you can only look at one account at a time. I'd like to see this information all grouped together in one place, and ideally sorted by popularity (i.e., with the sites followed by the most people toward the top). Thanks.

A Better 'Share This' Widget?

toomuchkatherine — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:55:06 -0800

I run a website. Our old 'Share This' widget that goes after posts is woefully out of date. Can anyone suggest a better one? The site I run is on Wordpress. We have a "Bookmark and Share This" thing after posts that just looks awful, and doesn't even have Twitter on it as an option. I'm looking for something free and visually pleasing that allows users to send a post to Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Facebook. More options are fine too. I appreciate your suggestions.

How to sync Twitter and Facebook Fan Page

Fluffy654 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:16:10 -0800

How do I sync a twitter account with a Facebook Fan Page? Please note that I am not asking about Facebook Personal Profiles but the Facebook Pages that organizations have. I want to be able to update twitter by updating the Facebook Page Wall. I also want to be able to update the Facebook Page Wall by updating Twitter. I have tried both the Twitter and Selective Twitter Applications for Facebook but neither of them work.

What to follow on Twitter

greta simone — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:04:22 -0800

NYCtwitterfilter: Recommendations for NYC/Brooklyn related things to follow on Twitter. I finally joined twitter only after it took me some time (and many AskMeFi threads) to realize that I don’t need to use it for ‘social networking’ but can use it to keep up with fun finds in and around the city. I’m still a little slow on the uptake though, and need help with finding things to follow. What I’m interested in following:

-Food trucks
-Sales (for already affordable clothing/home/music/online stores, not Barney’s etc, because even things on sale there are too expensive)
-Free/cheap events (movies, festivals, shows, readings, etc)
-Music (shows, bands, clubs, etc)
-Other free/cheap/fun stuff (drink specials, food promotions [ie Free ice cream cones, etc], flea markets, farmers markets)
-Any other recommendations you might have.

I’m mostly just interested in being able to sign in at 4:00 on a Friday to look and see what I can get into for the weekend.

I just moved to the area, will be living in Brooklyn shortly, mid-twenties female with average indie leanings of music, movies, books, style. I should emphasize that I have very little expendable income (social worker), so I’m interested in things that are cheap.

Thanks!

looking for a twitter app for the iphone

dfriedman — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:59:45 -0800

What Twitter app for the iPhone do you like? I'm looking for a Twitter app for the iPhone. I often want to send links via Twitter from my iPhone. Problem is, sometimes the link plus the text I type in is more than 140 characters.

So, the question: is there a Twitter app for the iPhone that will automatically take URLs and shrink them via bit.ly or tinyurl or some other URL-shrinking service?

I currently use Tweetie for the iPhone and see no way of having it do this automatically. If I'm missing something with this app let me know.

Thanks.

Fake Twitter Accounts

lipsum — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:22:27 -0800

I recently fell in love with the concept of fake Twitter accounts, and I'm currently collecting them towards some sort of a project. Can you recommend you favorite (if any) fakes on Twitter?

I don't need it. But... I think I want it?

Tequila Mockingbird — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:40:44 -0800

I can't seem to get into the whole Twitter experience. While I think I like the concept, after trying it several times I always seem to lose interest soon afterward. Is it just not for me, or are there some cool uses for it that I'm not aware of? What could I do with Twitter to make it worthwhile? What do you do? I don't have a blog or a website that needs followers, and most of the friends I enjoy interacting with are on Facebook. Still, there's something about Twitter that makes me want to put it to use. What are some unusual (or just generally useful) things I could do with it?

How do I get actual customer support from Twitter?

jdroth — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:22:35 -0800

I run a moderately popular blog. I'd like to have the Twitter account associated with the URL, but it's suspended -- presumably because somebody used it for evil. I've contacted Twitter support several times, and they make motions like it's possible for me to claim this account but then they just close my ticket (marking it as "solved") with no explanation. I cannot figure out how to get actual support. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? How can I get Twitter support to actually support me and not mark an unsolved issue as "solved"? Am I simply at the mercy of the Twitter fates? Yes, I know Twitter is a free product and that I get what I pay for. Thanks.

Help me make my friend love twitter.

superbird — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:32:43 -0800

What sort of guidelines should I provide for a friend for a crash course in social networking? My friend and I are doing an experiment where we give up the thing we love most (for me: video games; for him: books) for a week and indulge in something we don't appreciate very much (for me: books; for him: social networking).

We're laying out ground rules for one another that are designed to both stretch us and help us to appreciate the medium. So, for my friend: what are some good guidelines I can propose to help my friend understand and appreciate facebook and twitter for a week.

Yes, I know a week is not quite enough time to really have him get it, but that's what we have. And there are no rules against doing preparatory work before the week starts. So, be creative and provide me a bunch of guidelines I can give him to make him love facebook and twitter!

Are there any alt comix artists on Twitter?

Josh Coe — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:36:53 -0800

Are there any alt comix artists on Twitter? Some of my favorite web comic artists are on Twitter, like John Campbell (pictures for sad children - @itsjohncampbell), Kate Beaton (Hark, a vagrant - @beatonna), and Ryan North (quantz - @ryanqnorth).

But what about print alt comix artists? Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes.. Is anyone on Twitter?

PHP -> Twitter API at specified times: what am I Doing Wrong?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:29:11 -0800

Please help me write a PHP script that publishes Twitter updates at pre-specified times. I'm working on a script that will update Twitter with reminders about upcoming shows at a music festival, building on lodev's idea here.

I've currently got this script, which calls a text file structured like in this made-up example:

XXXUPDATE SponsorCo Stage: THE BEATLES in 30 minutes XXXTIME August 21 2009 21:30 +0200 XXXDONE 0 XXXENDLINE XXXUPDATE MegaCorp Stage: ROLLING STONES in 30 minutes XXXTIME August 21 2009 22:45 +0200 XXXDONE 0 XXXENDLINE

Proprietary format, I know. :) There are six Twitter accounts right now for separate concert stages, more may follow.

All six separate scripts are called from a Ruby file via pycron, every minute. I understand that's plenty often and I don't really need that kind of temporal resolution, but it uses relatively few processor cycles so I'm not really complaining.

As you can see in the PHP code:

if (($now <= ($utime + 30)) && ($now >= ($utime - 29))) {

if ($update[3] !== 1) {

When an update is ready for publication it should, theoretically at least, satisfy the first "if" statement and be published. The second "if" checks a "done" flag in the text file which I have as of yet not used (i.e. they're all set to 0 and the current code doesn't amend them).

Now, I "stress-tested" this with some test updates on all six accounts, including many simultaneous ones (carrying the same timestamp) on the different accounts for ten minutes with six (one for each account) every minute, and out of maybe a hundred-something tweets (I ran multiple iterations of the test) only one was dropped, i.e. it was in the text file but was not published.

Even one dropped update is unacceptable to me, and I strongly suspect I am Doing It Wrong. But how? The problem basically boils down to the following question:

What better method would there be to push out the updates reliably using the server config I currently have (XP, Apache, PHP5, Ruby, pycron), very preferably without using databases?

When it comes to scripting I really only speak PHP and a little JavaScript: even the (very basic) Ruby script was kindly provided to me for a different project.

So there's just too little time before the event to learn a new language or start out with MySQL or whatever before the event, and I'm not really eager to change to different software or change my server configuration (or set up another box) just for one-off project that will last just a few days. This is just to say that it's not due to an unwillingness on my part, but rather due to practical considerations.

If anyone could offer their insights I would be ever so grateful. Thanks in advance, guys.

I don't want to Twitter, you twat

educatedslacker — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:42:34 -0800

Doesn't Twitter authenticate email addresses when people sign up for new accounts? I was away from my computer for a while today, and when I came back to my email, someone had created a Twitter account using MY email address and started adding/receiving contacts (followers, whatever).

I reset the password and then deleted the account. Moments later I got a request to restore the account.

So Twitter, one of the most popular sites on the whole interwebs (but of which I am NOT a member), really lets people just sign up any email address and start posting immediately without verification of that email address? Doesn't that seem... I don't know... like a terrible idea?

Has anyone else ever dealt with this?

She said I should talk more about my cat; that people like that sort of thing here. I didn't know I still had a cat. Explains a few things.

grumblebee — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:22:15 -0800

Did anyone archive the cwalken posts on Twitter? There used to be a fake Christopher-Walken account on Twitter. The posts were brilliant, surreal gems. But Twitter shut it down. There's a new account that might be by the same writer, but all the old posts are gone. I'm hoping someone saved them somewhere.

Twitter Filter: Making the business case

Ezrie — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:53:22 -0800

How to present the business case for using Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed et al to drive our company's business I work for a small, blue-blood financial services firm. I have been recently tasked with with some basic marketing duties. I want to make a splash at our next management meeting with some real business focused statistics, resources, and information that will help me make the case for us using the social mediums mentioned above. I am hoping for something like white papers or industry reports that I can present and expand upon. Do such resources exist, and if so, where?

OAuth authentication for a desktop Twitter client?

DWRoelands — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:09:16 -0800

I'm working on a Twitter client that I intend to eventually post to Projects, but I've hit a stumbling block with OAuth authentication. I'm using the excellent Twitter OAuth implementation from Shannon Whitley. My application can successfully get an Authorization Link, and Twitter gives me a six-digit PIN. I'm having a devil of a time getting that PIN back to Twitter for the final authentication step.

I added the following method to Shannon's OAuth class:
public bool ValidatePin(string PIN)
{
string response = WebRequest(Method.GET, string.Format("{0}?oauth_verifier={1}", ACCESS_TOKEN, PIN), string.Empty);
if (response.Length > 0)
{
//Store the Token and Token Secret
var qs = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(response);
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(qs["oauth_token"])) this.Token = qs["oauth_token"];
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(qs["oauth_token_secret"])) this.TokenSecret = qs["oauth_token_secret"];
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}

I consistently get "401-Unauthorized" from Twitter when making the "oauth_verifier" call.

I know that my application's consumer_key and consumer_key_secret are valid, because I can successfully get the authorization link with the PIN.

I've been over the OAuth documentation and the Twitter API Wiki and haven't been able to turn up a solution.

Any help or guidance on this would be greatly appreciated, and I'll compose adoring haiku about you and include it in the code that I'll be releasing open-source.

Teach me your TwitterFu

Susurration — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:10:24 -0800

Help me become a Twittermeister. How do people find you and what apps do you run? I was tweeting lots of ideas from a conference in the last couple of days. In the process, I gathered 27 new followers. So my question is, how did these people find my tweets? What apps do people run (pref. for Windows) to see the twitter "stream" as it goes past? How can I, in turn, find the fascinating stuff that is going on?
I found this previous question, but the links are either dead or don't apply. I'm a techie, but a relative newbie to twitter, so I'd appreciate some TwitterFu ...

Pimp My FaceTweet

shallowcenter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:16:52 -0800

Mid-level Facebook user and low-level Twitterer seeks way to maximize these social media services for networking, information aggregation, and long walks on the beach. Oh, yeah, all while not spending every waking nanosecond online hitting "refresh." The details: I'm a freelance writer and blogger looking to give clients and potential clients a better sense of the scope of my work. Currently I post links to my blog posts to both FB and Twitter, but it just feels as if I'm not using these services to their full potential. On FB I also do the usual posting of daily activities and random thoughts; I don't do that on Twitter.

So how do you resolve the personal-professional Facebook/Twitter dilemma? I looked through answers to this previous AskMefi question, and it has some good thoughts but doesn't quite capture what I'm looking for. What do you think, friends? Thanks in advance!

Will the unreal LeVar Burton Please Stand Up?

unmake — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:04:14 -0800

Is there an archive of LeVar Burton's twitter impersonator? During his appearance on the first episode of Kevin Pollak's Chat Show LeVar describes how he got into twitter - thanks to a rather funny impersonator.

Because of Reading Rainbow, Burton's sort of on a saintly pedestal, so I can see how a fake twitter account might be sort of hilarious. My google-fu only turns up articles about the #LeWar with Michael Ian Black.

Twitter posts presumably from Twitterfeed displaying as from web

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:42:37 -0800

A while ago, I set up a Twitter account that aggregates several RSS feeds using Twitterfeed (don't want to associate my MeFi account with it, hence the anonymous post). I never manually post to it. I just noticed that from June 1 to June 2, there's a string of about 20 tweets displaying as having been posted from the web, not from Twitterfeed. What gives?