All Geekness Great and Small

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

We all know, by now, that Twitter limits its tweets to 140 characters. We’ve all got pretty good at limiting ourselves to 140 characters, but many overlook a hidden limit. This post outlines what that is and how we can avoid it.

Many users of Twitters are hoping that their followers will retweet (RT) their tweets. Twitter recently made a change to how these work, but in general, the following pattern is followed:

   UserXYZ tweets: Hey... here's something that's fascinating
   UserABC tweets: RT @UserXYZ: Hey... here's something that's fascinating

User XYZ’s tweet was 42 characters. UserABC’s RT was 52 characters, i.e. 10 characters were added in order to RT.

Put another way, if UserXYZ creates a tweet that was longer than 130 characters, nobody would be able to RT it with modifying the original tweet. If you’re trying to get a specific message out to the world, you might not be happy with lots of people fiddling with it.

I’ve created a new Greasemonkey script which will help you with this. I’ve written about Greasemonkey plugins before and this is another Twitter helper. If you install the script, you will see the following change:

You can now see, next to the normal character countdown, a bracketed countdown. This is the number of characters that you have left, before a tweet can no longer be RTed without modification. In this example, you would be able to send the tweet (as you have 6 characters left), but Twitter users would have to remove 8 characters before they could RT your Tweet.

To use this, it’s simple:

1. If you haven’t already, install Greasemonkey
2. Install the ReTweetable Alert script

That’s it! As ever, your questions and comments are most welcome

• @bnix Likewise. Check out @nerdniteaustin too! in reply to bnix #
• Just landed at IAD for a few days work in Gaithersburg. Anyone around for a beverage one evening? #
• @acarback The one and only in reply to acarback #
• @acarback How local are you? My availability is customer dependant in reply to acarback #
• RT @nerdniteaustin: Counting down the days to the first nerdnite Austin of the fall http://austin.nerdnite.com in reply to nerdniteaustin #
• @acarback Sure! I'm done for today… in reply to acarback #
• @acarback Lovely to meet you in person, at last. Prepare for Word Ace ownage in reply to acarback #
• @estellekensdale welcome welcome welcome! #
• @estellekensdale Is this your green bird on the banner of http://www.surfbirds.com/ukbirdid.html in reply to estellekensdale #
• If we all tweet about GMail being down… it will magically fix it #
• RT @nerdniteaustin: Become a fan of nerdnite Austin on Facebook: http://bit.ly/nEqEd #
• RT @nerdniteaustin: New post: New Facebook Page (http://cli.gs/SrZZG) #
• @chuq … Human sarcifice… Dogs and cats living together… Mass Hysteria! in reply to chuq #
• @zandradee Surely you mean 'i cad sbell de zee'? in reply to zandradee #
• RT @TheOnion: In Focus: Man Succumbs To 7-Year Battle With Health Insurance http://bit.ly/jCi7v in reply to TheOnion #
• finally on my way home. good POC session with the customer. still… will be good to get home #
• ugh! someone on flight DL1119 to AUS reeks of rotten beer bleck! #
• @wesley83 when is it? if tonight, then no; am on a flight from ATL to AUS right now #
• just realised: less than 24 hours until #nerdniteaustin. oooooh yeeeeah! #
• RT @nerdniteaustin: Nerd Nite 2Nite!! Can't wait until 7PM at @buffaloatx. Be there, and be square. #
• @djteknokid Food is available from the Buffalo Billiards gang, at @nerdniteaustin in reply to djteknokid #
• @ValerieKusler I may know 4 for 4 square. Two experienced. Two rookie. Is this open to all comers? in reply to ValerieKusler #
• @jessicamullen Meth? in reply to jessicamullen #
• http://pic.gd/f0d661 Holy crap. Picking up Hilton wireless network from this far away #
• @MikeDeChellis nerd by name… in reply to MikeDeChellis #
• Rio Rita's, here I come… you delicious delicious slices are not safe #
• @jessicamullen Sleep deprivation and stress will do that. As will Spazzy Eye Syndrome in reply to jessicamullen #
• Any credit report experts out there? One account appears 8 times on report. Is that normal? #
• @overprocessed Confused: what makes a sphere the 'best'? #
• Facebook is the Windows of social networking. Fundamentally shit, but too broadly used to be abandoned #
• @jessicamullen Really? Since 'dud' is slang for a failure… in reply to jessicamullen #

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The other day, the preDevCamp team published our ‘PreView’ map at http://predevcamp.org/preView.html. In this post, I’ll talk about how it was put together.

PreView is a combination of the Google Maps API and the Twitter API. Without wanting to shatter the mystique, I’m going to outline how I set about creating PreView.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, my sister sent me a tweet that posed a good question: “How is Twitter any better or different than an SMS or Facebook?”.

To me, the major difference is intent; intended audience and the intention behind all submissions.
Read the rest of this entry »

Like a fair number of people, I have a number of Twitter identities. I have my personal identity (@dancrumb) as well as a number of shared identities that represent events or organizations in which I’m involved.

I use a number of clients to send out tweets, but all of these clients limit you to a single identity. If you want to user twitter.com to send out messages, you need to log in with the appropriate identity before you perform any Twitter functions.

Herein lies the problem. When you’re logged in to Twitter and you navigate to somebody’s Twitter page, there is no indication as to who you’re logged in as. The risk is that you could elect to follow or message someone, thinking you’re logged in as one identity, only to find that you’re logged in as another identity. I did precisely this, yesterday. As luck would have it, the person was my sister and I quickly spotted my mistake, but if  you’re using Twitter as a major communication channel, you need to be very aware of which identity you’re tweeting with.

In order to address this, I’ve written a small Greasemonkey script. You can access it here. You’ll need to have the Greasemonkey plugin installed, of course.

Once the script is installed, you will be able to see who you’re logged on as, in the Twitter navigation bar at the top right-hand corner of the screen, at all times.

I hope you find it useful; I know from experience that I will…

As part of the preDevCamp 2009 site, I created a JavaScript TwitterFeed today.

A sample can be seen here. If you leave this page open, it will constantly update with all Twitter tweets that contain the word ‘twitter’. It will update once every 5 seconds and will contain no more than the 25 most recent tweets.

Installing this code into a page of your own is very simple. You will need the following:

• jQuery must be installed and you must include it in your webpage
• tweetFeed.js must be included in your webpage
• tweetFeed.css should be included, although the function will work without this file
• A <div> with an id of ‘tweets’ somewhere on the page

With all of those in place, it’s a simple case of instantiating the feed:

var tf = new TweetFeed(searchString,feedPeriod,feedLength);

searchString

This is the string that is used to generate the feed. The feed will contain all tweets containing this word

feedPeriod

Number of seconds between each refresh of the feed

feedLength

Maximum number of tweets to show. At the moment, this must be > 15 or else the feed doesn’t work properly.

All of the relevant code can be found by looking at the example, linked to above. Feel free to use this in any way you like. Comments are welcome