How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Twitter Cards Validation Error

January 26, 2015 | Comment

Twitter have had a neat feature for a while now that allows for additional information to be included with a tweet that is then displayed when you expand the tweet. This is how it looks:

And on a mobile client:

To enable these you need to set-up some meta data on your website (there is a good guide here) and then validate this information with Twitter here. When I did so I was greeted by the following message:

ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)

This … Read the rest

Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?

March 21, 2013 | Comment

So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.

From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.

APP.NET looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also … Read the rest

How to shoot yourself in the foot

September 20, 2012 | Comment

There has been a lot of publicity in the tech press recently about changes to the terms and conditions around Twitter’s api. The changes have been made to try and strongly encourage developers of Twitter client apps to, well, basically not continue as Twitter would like to see that area as their sole domain.

Echofon, my go-to Twitter app until this morning, has clearly taken this change to heart and hit the self-destruct button early. Since releasing a new iOS version, which was supposed to bring compatibility is the latest version but seems to have had a devastating effect, many … Read the rest

If This, Then That

June 11, 2012 | Comment

Sometimes the Internet throws up a really simple but great idea that makes life much easier. If this, then that or ifttt to be more accurate, is one such idea.

ifttt allows you to create tasks where an action is carried out on some event. So, for example, when an email is received from a certain email address a copy is then forwarded automatically to another account, or when the Guardian tweets that the latest Long Good Read is available the text is sent to Instapaper. These are two examples but given the long list of services that ifttt … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

TweetNotebook

December 24, 2009 | Comment

In what must be one of the greatest acts of egotistical self-indulgence a couple of weeks ago I ordered a TweetNotebook.

For those that aren’t familiar with it the TweetNotebook is a notebook with a random selection of your tweets printed at the bottom of each page and with your Twitter icon printed on the front along with a customisable quote. A selection of pictures of mine are left and below.

Well mine arrived this morning and I have to say it is just fantastic and much better than I expected it to be. Why? Well for a start … Read the rest

TweetCloud

December 2, 2009 | Comment

I have covered word clouds before when I looked at the service Wordle. Another, similar, service has popped up over the last few days offering a similar service for your Tweets, tweet cloud. Having pointed it to my Twitter stream @spokenlikeageek (you are following me, right?) it produced the graphic on the left showing the most frequently used words over the last year. Oh and what a surprise! I love my iPhone!

The top six words were:

iphone
google
windows
apple
netbook
chrome

Does that scream geek to you? I would be interested to know what your top … Read the rest

Twitter Spam

June 23, 2009 | 2 comments

Is it just me or is Twitter spam on the increase? I have had a stream of notifications of today telling me that someone is now following me. You can tell that these are spam accounts as they have only one update and multiple followers. Oh, and the scantily clad woman in the picture is also a bit of a give away! You can block these individually but what would be really good would be if I could reject anyone who has, say, less than 10 updates.

There is a Twitter feed with advice and guidance on spam (@spam… Read the rest