Simon Willison’s Weblog

“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 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

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

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

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