157 items tagged “twitter”
2010
Does Twitter use a 3rd party software for rate limiting their APIs? If yes, who’s the 3rd party?
I wrote up a technique for doing simple rate limiting using memcached a while ago, which I later found out was somewhat similar to how the Twitter API does it.
[... 56 words]WebKit is Dropping HTML5 “popstate” Events (via) Really nasty bug with WebKit’s pushState support, discovered by Ben Cherry from Twitter. popState events get dropped if the user navigates while an outbound network request is in progress.
Twitter.com 2010 Redesign: What things don’t people like about #newTwitter?
I absolutely love the improved functionality, but I don’t like the way it’s implemented as a heavy single-page JavaScript application. It’s extremely slow to load, which is a big problem for me because I habitually open new tabs with e.g. twitter.com/username in them, and each of those tabs now takes far longer to load and show me information than old Twitter did (especially since I’ve been suffering on very slow hotel WiFi connections recently).
[... 133 words]While I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the medium goes, I do support the idea, and I hope that Twitter as a business can coexist with the need for the world to have a free, open, reliable, and verifiable way for humans to instantly communicate in a one-to-many fashion.
RasterWeb: Lanyrd. Pete Prodoehl calls me out on Lanyrd’s integration with the Twitter auth API at the expense of OpenID. I’ve posted a comment with my justification—essentially, tying to Twitter’s ecosystem means I can actually implement the features I’ve been talking about building on top of OpenID for years, with far less engineering effort.
Lanyrd—the social conference directory. Nat and my new project, launched today and doing pretty well despite some early server hiccups. Sign in with Twitter to see conferences that your friends are speaking at, attending or tracking, then add your own events. We’re particularly keen on helping people build up a detailed profile of their previous talks, so adding older conferences is encouraged.
A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. [...] No one noticed. Not even me. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.
simplegeo’s python-oauth2. The Python OAuth library scene is frighteningly complicated at the moment. This seems to be the most actively maintained, and the readme includes working example code for talking to the Twitter API (including integration with Django auth).
Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.
Realtime Election Tweets. Jay Caines-Gooby’s realtime election tweet service, using Node.js, nginx and WebSocket with a Flash fallback.
Twitter is turning itself from a social network into a gigantic tuple-space pubsub platform that just happens to have a big social network implemented on top of it.
twitter’s gizzard (via) Intriguing new open source project from Twitter. Gizzard is a sharding framework which provides a network service for partitioning data across arbitrary backend datastores, managing its own forwarding table to map key ranges to partitions and adding support for tree-based replication.
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”..
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.
Follow a Museum day. It’s follow a museum on Twitter day. Useful directory of museum Twitter accounts around the world, organised by country.
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.
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.
2009
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application.
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.
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.”
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
YQL: INSERT INTO internet. insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values (“Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL”, “twitterusername”,“twitterpassword”)
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.
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.
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.