OpenID85 items tagged “twitter”
Twitter, reformatted. I wrote a Yahoo! Pipe to clean up Twitter’s RSS feeds—removing the username prefix and filtering out items that begin with “@” or “RT”.. 
18th March 2010, 1:10 am
twitter-text-conformance (via) This is a neat idea: Twitter have released open source libraries for parsing standard tweet syntax in Ruby and Java, but they’ve also released a set of YAML unit tests aimed at anyone who wants to implement the same parsing logic in other languages. 
6th February 2010, 3:39 pm
Follow a Museum day. It’s follow a museum on Twitter day. Useful directory of museum Twitter accounts around the world, organised by country. 1st February 2010, 11:15 am
russell davies: datadecs. Personalised christmas decorations made from data from Twitter, Doppler, last.fm and Flickr. The Twitter snowman came from a 3D printer—the size of the head varies depending on your number of followers. Best of all though is the Flickr decoration which represents the apertures you’ve used over the past year. 7th January 2010, 9:58 pm
Self-Proclaimed Social Media Gurus on Twitter Multiplying Like Rabbits (via) 15,740 of them, including 2,091 social media consultants, 807 social media experts, 445 social media gurus and 68 social media stars. 
4th January 2010, 1:49 am
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application. 17th November 2009, 1:09 pm
The Secret Identity of the Peep Show Tweeter. Like many others, I had assumed the Peep Show character accounts were “official”—especially when they started live-tweeting their thoughts in real time as the episodes were aired. Turns out it was actually a very clever fan. 30th October 2009, 6:46 pm
Comcast: Twitter Has Changed The Culture Of Our Company. “Frank Eliason (@Comcastcares on Twitter) now has 11 people working under him simply to respond to information about Comcast being broadcast on Twitter.” 21st October 2009, 9:56 am
Simon Willison (simonw) on Twitter. I just realised I’ve never actually linked to my Twitter account on my blog. This is mainly an experiment to see if doing so makes my follower count go up... 29th September 2009, 9:49 pm
When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.
— Blaine Cook 
13th August 2009, 1:06 pm
tr.im is “discontinuing service”. “However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”—these statements seem to contradict themselves. Will tr.im URLs in tweets stop working after December 31st or not? Any chance they could hand the domain over to the Internet Archive? At any rate, this is exactly why centralised URL shorteners are a harmful trend. 10th August 2009, 11:06 am
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack. Long-winded explanation of the recent Twitter break-in, but you can scroll to the bottom for a numbered list summary. The attacker first broke in to a Twitter employee’s personal Gmail account by “recovering” it against an expired Hotmail account (which the attacker could hence register themselves). They gained access to more passwords by searching for e-mails from badly implemented sites that send you your password in the clear. 20th July 2009, 12:55 am
Curating conversations. Chris Thorpe has open-sourced the Guardian’s moderated Twitter backchannel app, for displaying back channels at high profile (and hence high potential for abuse) events. It’s a Python application that runs on App Engine. 16th July 2009, 7:34 pm
You should follow me on Twitter. Dustin Curtis did a simple A/B testing experiment on his blog and found that the text “you should follow me on Twitter” had the highest click-through rate—173% more effective than “I’m on Twitter”. 15th July 2009, 10:43 am
YQL: INSERT INTO internet. insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values (“Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL”, “twitterusername”,“twitterpassword”) 8th July 2009, 8:19 pm
Up and running with Cassandra. Twitter are beginning to use Cassandra, the open source branch of Facebook’s BigTable-like non-relational database. Evan Weaver explains how to get started with it, but warns that it’s not yet a good idea to trust data to it without having a full backup in an unrelated storage engine. 7th July 2009, 11:18 am
cache-money. A “write-through caching library for ActiveRecord”, maintained by Nick Kallen from Twitter. Queries hit memcached first, and caches are automatically kept up-to-date when objects are created, updated and deleted. Only some queries are supported—joins and comparisons won’t hit the cache, for example. 28th June 2009, 3:17 pm
Twitter, an Evolving Architecture. The most detailed write-up of Twitter’s current architecture I’ve seen, explaining the four layers of cache (all memcached) used by the Twitter API. 28th June 2009, 3:09 pm
C64 Twitter client. Awesome. 17th June 2009, 9:14 am
The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive? Twitter tweet IDs will shortly tick over past the maximum signed 32 bit integer, potentially breaking applications. I learnt this lesson when the same thing happened to Flickr photo IDs: never store numeric IDs from external systems as integers, always use strings. 
9th June 2009, 10:52 am
Muck Rack: Links posted by Guardian Journalists on Twitter. I’m rather impressed by the Sawhorse Media collection of Twitter aggregation sites (Muck Rack aggregates journalists)—a simple idea very well executed. Here’s a nice example—this page shows links posted to Twitter by known Guardian journalists, but goes a step further and scrapes in the favicon, the real title of the page and resolves the domain from any shortened links. 22nd May 2009, 10:02 pm
TwitterAlikeExample—redis. Excellent example of how you design a moderately complex system against a scalable key-value store (in this case redis). Most “how to build Twitter” code examples fail to address the hard problem of scaling user inboxes, but this one tackles it head on. 21st May 2009, 11:14 pm
I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.
— Matt Maroon 20th April 2009, 8:50 pm
peeping into memcached. “Peep uses ptrace to freeze a running memcached server, dump the internal key metadata, and return the server to a running state”—you can then load the resulting data in to MySQL using LOAD LOCAL INFILE and analyse it using standard SQL queries. 20th April 2009, 6:35 pm
Sign in with Twitter. Intriguing: Twitter are now an OpenID-style identity provider... using OAuth. 20th April 2009, 4:10 am
17-year-old claims responsibility for Twitter worm. It was a text book XSS attack—the URL on the user profile wasn’t properly escaped, allowing an attacker to insert a script element linking out to externally hosted JavaScript which then used Ajax to steal any logged-in user’s anti-CSRF token and use it to self-replicate in to their profile. 12th April 2009, 7:22 pm
Twitter: blaming Ruby for their mistakes? The comments on the entry include replies from Twitter employees and the RabbitMQ consultant they brought in, and provide a full rebuttal to the various accusations of NIH that were thrown around recently. 6th April 2009, 11:06 am
Mending The Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion. Not at all surprised to see Alex Payne write this considering the low quality of discussion around anything technical to do with Twitter. 5th April 2009, 7:59 pm
Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. I asked Kellan about scaling activity streams the other day. Here he suggests the best technique is not to promise a perfect stream (like Twitter does)—Facebook used to get away with 80% loss of update messages, but their new redesign has changed the contract with their users. 19th March 2009, 2:02 pm
Parallel merge sort in Erlang. Thoughts on an Erlang-y way of implementing a combined activity stream (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). Activity streams are a Really Hard Problem—as far as I know there’s no best practise for implementing them yet. 15th March 2009, 1:36 pm
The Internet Archive should actively partner with bit.ly / tinyurl.com / icanhaz.com etc. and maintain a mirror database of their redirects
— Me, on Twitter 8th March 2009, 2:59 pm
How search.twitter.com uses Varnish. Includes examples of the configuration options they use. 2nd March 2009, 5:08 pm
Kestrel. Twitter’s Robey Pointer rewrote their Starling message queue in 1500 lines of Scala, adding reliable fetch (where consumers can confirm their receipt of an item) and blocking fetches, which reduce the need for consumers to poll for updates (and hence solve my only beef with the original Starling). I haven’t tried running this on a low spec VPS yet but it looks very promising. 26th February 2009, 10:20 am
Oscars 2009: the interactive results | guardian.co.uk. My latest project for the Guardian, put together on very short notice. Updates live as the results are announced, and allows Twitter users to vote on their favourite for each category by sending a specially formatted message to @guardianfilm—jQuery and Ajax polling against S3 under the hood. 23rd February 2009, 2:19 am
Twitter Don’t Click Exploit. Someone ran a successful ClickJacking exploit against Twitter users, using a transparent iframe holding the Twitter homepage with a status message fed in by a query string parameter. Thiss will definitely help raise awareness of ClickJacking! Twitter has now added framebusting JavaScript to prevent the exploit. 
12th February 2009, 7:56 pm
Four reasons why public Facebook status updates won’t kill Twitter. Mike Butcher highlights the importance of “follow” rather than “friend” in social software. 9th February 2009, 7:04 pm
FluidDB domain names available early (and free) for Twitter users. It’s interesting how Twitter has revitalised the concept of usernames as first class identifiers. FluidDB hasn’t even launched yet, but it’s allowing people to reserve their Twitter username within the FluidDB system just by following @fluidDB. 24th January 2009, 11:44 pm
Rate limiting with memcached
On Monday, several high profile “celebrity” Twitter accounts started spouting nonsense, the victims of stolen passwords. Wired has the full story—someone ran a dictionary attack against a Twitter staff member, discovered their password and used Twitter’s admin tools to reset the passwords on the accounts they wanted to steal. [... 910 words]
Weak Password Brings “Happiness” to Twitter Hacker. The full story on the Twitter admin account hack. I bet there are a LOT of web applications out there that don’t track and rate-limit failed password attempts. 
7th January 2009, 12:04 pm
The Twitter administrator hack was a dictionary attack. I quoted Blaine earlier suggesting that the recent Twitter mass-hack was due to a Twitter admin password being scooped up by a rogue third party application—this was not the case, as Alex Payne explains in a comment. 6th January 2009, 11:56 pm
Update on the “antipatterns for sale” Twply auction (via) The collected username and password database is NOT included in the auction. 6th January 2009, 9:41 am
As more details become available, it seems what happened is that a Twitter administrator (i.e., employee) gave their password to a 3rd party site because their API requires it, which was then used to compromise Twitter’s admin interface.
— Blaine Cook 6th January 2009, 9:37 am
The username/password key’s major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That’s a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter’s case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.
— Alex Payne 5th January 2009, 10:47 am
Antipatterns for sale. Twply collected over 800 Twitter usernames and passwords (OAuth can’t arrive soon enough) and was promptly auctioned off on SitePoint to the highest bidder. 
2nd January 2009, 10:48 am
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID. Great. Now even Google is asking me for my Twitter password. Slow clap. How’s that Twitter OAuth beta coming along? 15th December 2008, 5:20 pm
Responders will tell you that broadcasters are condescending talking heads who think they’re too good for the community. Broadcasters wish responders would take their nonsensical patter to a chat room, where they could natter on in privacy. Everyone agrees that members of the other group are total jackasses who don’t know how to use Twitter.
— Margaret Mason 9th December 2008, 6:06 pm
It’s funny, when I sit down to write something for Phoenix I feel like I have to get into my “Phoenix character.” [...] I try to be the eternal optimist because people are getting so upset about the mission coming to an end, and I’m trying to lessen that grief.
— Veronica McGregor 11th November 2008, 12:21 pm
Interview @MarsPhoenix (via) “For over a year, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.”—an interview with the Twitter voice of the Mars Phoenix lander. 11th November 2008, 12:17 pm
Tweetersation. Nat and my latest side project: a JSONP API powered tool to more easily follow conversations between people on Twitter, by combining their tweets in to a single timeline. 2nd October 2008, 5:08 pm
“You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter”. The inevitable Twitter song by Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), the resident troubadour at the Oxford Geek Nights. Go along on Wednesday to see him live! 25th August 2008, 8:59 pm
OAuth came out of my worry that if the Twitter API became popular, we’d be spreading passwords all around the web. OAuth took longer to finish than it took for the Twitter API to become popular, and as a result many Twitter users’ passwords are scattered pretty carelessly around the web. This is a terrible situation, and one we as responsible web developers should work to prevent.
— Blaine Cook 14th August 2008, 10:01 am
The statement that the password anti-pattern “teaches users to be phished” should be rephrased “has taught users to be phished”
— Me, on Twitter 13th August 2008, 12:52 pm
If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we’ve come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.
— Danny O'Brien 20th July 2008, 9 am
It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.
— Me, on Twitter 7th July 2008, 5:14 pm
OAuth for Google Data APIs (via) Awesome. Now, how’s OAuth support shaping up over at Twitter (who are serious offenders when it comes to encouraging the password anti-pattern, despite Twitter engineers being key to the creation of the original OAuth spec)? 27th June 2008, 7:49 am
Twitter, or Architecture Will Not Save You. Kellan is not an armchair architect. He also doesn’t mention Rails once. Well worth reading. 29th May 2008, 1:16 am
Twitter / MarsPhoenix. NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander, due to land on the planet today, has a Twitter account. Bio: “I dig Mars!”. 25th May 2008, 7:41 pm
Scoble writes something—6,800 writes are kicked off, 1 for each follower. Michael Arrington replies—another 6,600 writes. Jason Calacanis jumps in—another 6,500 writes. Beyond the 19,900 writes, there’s a lot of additional overhead too. You have to hit a DB to figure out who the 19,900 followers are. [...] And here’s the kicker: that giant processing and delivery effort—possibly a combined 100K disk IOs—was caused by 3 users, each just sending one, tiny, 140 char message. How innocent it all seemed.
— Isreal L'Heureux 23rd May 2008, 7:28 pm
Hey Google: any chance we can all build the social web together without requiring JavaScript?
— Me 
13th May 2008, 1:49 pm
twistori. Lovely implementation of a neat idea for a Twitter app from Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs. 4th May 2008, 8:20 am
Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition (via) Leonard says what needs to be said about the most recent case of Twitter scaling flame-bait. 25th April 2008, 11:19 pm
Cluetrainwreck. Comcast’s official Twitter account is pretty creepy... “I hope we can change your perception of Comcast!”. 19th April 2008, 8 am
Making bridges talk. Tom Armitage hooked Tower Bridge up to Twitter: “I am closing after the MV Dixie Queen has passed Upstream”. 4th March 2008, 11:07 pm
twauth: simple mobile openid using twitter (via) Brilliant proof of concept by Ian McKellar: an OpenID provider that authenticates you by sending you a Twitter direct message. 14th January 2008, 10:28 pm
RubyForge: Starling. “Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.” 11th January 2008, 9:47 pm
Boxing Day toy discovery: Mega Bloks not compatible with Duplo! See, Alex Russell? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU INNOVATE AHEAD OF STANDARDS
— Yoz Grahame 26th December 2007, 5:58 pm
DeWitt Clinton: T-Mobile and Twitter. “If you think the rest of Internet needs net neutrality laws, that’s nothing compared with the backward-facing worldview of the established mobile carriers.” 15th December 2007, 12:26 pm
identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin. 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm
WebRunner 0.7—New and Improved. A simple application for running a site-specific browser for a service (e.g. Twitter, Gmail etc). This is a great idea: it isolates your other browser windows from crashes and also isolates your cookies, helping guard against CSRF attacks. 27th September 2007, 1:55 pm
Twitter / Natalie: Its announced and official... We’re both moving to Brighton in September. 26th July 2007, 5:22 pm
Friends, Followers, and Notifications. Twitter drops the confusing distinction between “friend” and “follow”—now it’s just “follow”. The less sites that demand I reduce friendship to a binary decision the better. 20th July 2007, 10:59 am
SlideShare: Webapps scalability. Lots of great presentations on scaling, from Twitter, Digg, Vox, LiveJournal, Last.fm and more. 4th July 2007, 12:53 am
Importing your social network from other sites. Dopplr now does this from GMail, Twitter, vCard or hCard and XFN. I’m convinced that contact import is a killer app for OpenID. 26th June 2007, 1:46 am
SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome. I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all. 22nd June 2007, 12:40 am
The Twitter API Respects Your Privacy. Not Twitter’s fault: The users who exposed their data through Twittervision had given that site their username and password; Twittervision was failing to hide protected updates. 24th May 2007, 11:37 pm
There’s a hole in your Twitter. If you’ve been using friends-only messages on Twitter they may currently be exposed via the API. 24th May 2007, 5:03 pm
The top 10 presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. I normally avoid linking to “top 10” lists on principle, but this one pulls together some great resources and adds extra context to each one. 1st May 2007, 1:51 pm
Scaling Twitter (via) Slides from Blaine’s recent talk. 23rd April 2007, 11:02 am
In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray 14th April 2007, 9:13 am
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter 
12th April 2007, 2:51 pm
Twitter / secgen. The UN Secretary-General has an (unofficial) Twitter page. 5th April 2007, 10:21 pm
Twitter from TextMate. A TextMate Bundle that lets you send your currently selected text to Twitter. 25th March 2007, 6:10 pm
TweetyPy. A Python-based CLI client for Twitter, by Stuart Colville 24th March 2007, 4:47 pm
Les Orchard: “Web 3.0 will have Galactica-style angled corners.” (via) Here’s hoping. 15th February 2007, 10:35 pm
Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site. 22nd January 2007, 11:12 pm
