Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Newer Entries »

Introducing www.BadTwitterFriends.com

So I posted yesterday how to use the Twitter API but failed to mention my exact reason behind why I started messing with it in the first place. Quite simply it was because a friend I was following on Twitter wasn’t following me back. And I wondered who else wasn’t following me, the Twitter website was no real help as it only offers separate views of your friends and followers without any way to cross reference them. And after a little digging around I couldn’t find anything that did this, there was nothing in the Twitter clients I use, and the people I asked knew of nothing, and google was no help though granted the search terms I used are pretty ambiguous. So I decided to go about building my own.

Luckily the Twitter API is very easy to use and it didn’t take me long to have lists of both my friends and my followers, and once you have that the PHP array_diff() function takes care of the rest. In the space of a only few hours I had the whole thing up on my dev box and had hit up those wrongdoers who chose not to follow me demanding an explanation! People responded very well and explained that they’d run into this before and it was tough to keep track of your friends and followers on Twitter. Though it started as a joke it seemed I had ended up creating a way to visually display some Twitter information that until now had not been easily available.

In fact some of the feedback was so positive it was suggested that I make this available publicly, so I grabbed a domain name and setup a site for all to use. I cleaned up my code and made it production ready, and then proceeded to spend way more time than I had spent coding the whole thing to come up with a half decent design. I am no designer but luckily each users Twitter preferences are exposed by the API so I was able to use their background image and colors (this is a real bonus as it makes each results page visually unique).

As I talked about yesterday the API doesn’t allow for more than 100 queries an hour so I’ve had to add in some limitations, you can read more in the about section. But for the average Twitter user, as oppose to some celebrity super user with tens of thousands of followers, I think this is a simple enough tool that serves it’s specific purpose well. I guess just how useful it really is remains to be seen.

Anyways, without further ado I present to you www.BadTwitterFriends.com!

Oh and by the way, yes I am now being followed by the original offender!

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Web Apps | No Comments »

Make your own magazine – Issuu.com

Every now and again I run across a site/web app/web service that gets me really excited and restores my faith in the power of the web and the power of the people that make the web – the users and the developers. And today that site is Issuu.com. In a nutshell it is the YouTube of magazines. Any budding publisher can now make their work instantly available to the world, and the rest of us can spend our time enjoying the creative work offered. And just like YouTube the magazines you create are embeddable into your website (it does look like embedding a magazine is locked down to just the publisher as you can only assign one domain per account), here’s an example (click “Read Winds&Sails.pdf now” to launch embedded magazine).

I haven’t done more than explore a little so I can only report back that for a user the magazine interface is a pleasure to interact with and makes the magazines look really good. The site itself is very clean so I imagine that the admin interface for publishing is quite tidy and intuitive, for example publishing a magazine is as simple as uploading a pdf. A lot of the magazines look very professional, like as if they are actually primarily physically published and distributed, though I haven’t come across anything I recognize as mainstream. There are even comics too! One tiny issue I do have is that it seems there is not a good way to print a magazine out all at once, you have to do it on a page by page basis (maybe there’s a good reason, and there is a premium service that might addresses this), and I know that we have to save the trees and all that, and I am married to my computer and the web, but I am still that guy that likes to print stuff out and take it down to the cafeteria and kick back and read it old school style, get away from my laptop every now and again (I always recycle I promise).

So that’s that, Issuu.com, I think it’s great. Not the first attempt at an online magazine service I’m sure, but by far the best I’ve ever come across, on a par with YouTube or Hulu for its medium. Go take a look and have some fun, and if you come across anything really worth reading make sure you let me know!

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Tags: Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Apps | 1 Comment »

Enhancing Twitter via TweetDeck, aka Twitter day three

Okay so it’s day three of Twitter for me and I started to feel like I was pretty much tweeting to myself and didn’t have many people I was following, I was far from understanding the power of Twitter and what makes it so addictive. Getting ‘friends’ on Twitter didn’t seem all that easy, I find that the search facility provided is far from useful, unlike say the Facebook one which I find quite thorough. So I updated my Facebook status, where I have a few hundred friends, asking everyone that twitters to send me their info so I can follow them and hopefully get them to follow me (I know that there’s an app out there to sync your tweets to your facebook status, but I’ve always found this quite annoying as I find my news feed gets hijacked by twitterers and I wanted to learn to walk before I completely whored myself out to Twitter). I get hooked up with an old friend @keithelder who took the time to explain a couple of things to me, there’s actually a lot more to Twitter than meets the eye. For example you don’t just @name to comment on a persons tweet, there’s actually a reply button which associates your tweet as a comment to theirs (this I discovered for myself yesterday).

all @ replies
The first thing he explained to me is how to change my reply settings, which I didn’t even know you could. When logged into the Twitter website go to Settings->Notices and the second option down @replies allows you to change this setting, by default it’s set to only show replies from the people you’re following. The good thing with the ‘all @ replies’ setting is it allows you to see all replies posted by people you follow, whether or not you follow the person to whom the reply is directed, read more here. Basically by enabling this setting you’re better setup to find new people to follow, and maybe even come across some that you already know.

Twitter Clients
The next thing he told me was not to use the Twitter website and to get a client. I’d been using TwitterFon on the iPhone but I hadn’t really thought about this approach for my desktop. He pointed me to a Windows client he made called Witty Twitter (needs WPF so you’re good with .Net 3.5) which I installed and it looked pretty good. But no sooner had I installed it than I noticed that it actually tells you in a tweet what client was used to post it, and most people (including Keith who wrote the Witty Twitter app!) were using something called TweetDeck.

TweetDeck
And within a few minutes of installing TweetDeck a whole new world of understanding was opened up to me, it instantly made Twitter 100 times better, I finally grasped the potential that Twitter has. It’s honestly a completely different experience, in fact to the point where I wonder if they shouldn’t push a Twitter client as the primary tool when signing up, at least somehow make it obvious, or better yet make the website interface as useful. The first thing you notice is that its laid out into 3 different columns – ‘All Friends’, ‘Replies’, and ‘Direct Messages’, and that layout alone instantly helps you to understand how Twitter really works. Another obvious improvement over the web interface is the built in URL shrinking functionality, there’s various services to chose from, the most familiar being tinyurl, and you realize a tweet no longer needs to be a messy experience involving multiple tasks and windows. I won’t get into it much more, this isn’t intended as a review so much as a pointer in the right direction for Twitter novices such as myself.

Today Twitter is a lot less shit!

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Tags: Social Media, Twitter | 4 Comments »

Interactive Youtube videos

Okay so day one in the Twittersphere and it’s already proved quite useful. @skillwill, who is my old school boy from London, twittered about something called an interactive game on youtube. I followed the link and was quite surprised to find myself being able to play a game on Youtube.

Admittedly I knew nothing about the ability to make these interactive Youtube games and began googling them, expecting to find that they were a new phenomenon, only to find that they have in fact been around since at least May of last year, the earliest one I’ve found (without a whole lot of looking) is from May 14th 2008. I then started to realize there were a whole bunch of them out there from adventure games to video games, even the old favorite bar game, its like there is some whole subculture of Youtube gaming going on that I knew nothing about! But really it seems that this phenomenon has only recently bubbled to the surface as there are plenty of blog posts out there from as recently as a few weeks ago claiming a brand new game to be the first interactive Youtube game.

So the magic behind this is the video annotations Youtube offers. I guess this functionality originally came out last May, actually it looks like about 5 seconds before the first interactive game came out. And I haven’t had time to research fully but I came across this post saying that as of only a few weeks ago they have made it easier to add annotations, which implies that the functionality itself hasn’t advanced any and therefore wouldn’t explain a sudden influx of interactive games.

Once you look into the games themselves and you get over the wow factor you’ll probably conclude, like I did, that they’re kind of lame. But hey, when has something lame ever stopped us from using it to kill the odd boring hour online?

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Tags: Social Media, Youtube | 1 Comment »

I still think Twitter is a bit shit, but I joined anyways…

…and probably way later than I ever should have. I work in digital advertising and really should stay on top of all these social media apps, especially one with as much prominence as Twitter. I think when I first came across Twitter some years ago I looked into it, and I found it to be quite obnoxious and self indulgent, and all around I found it a bit shit, I certainly didn’t feel like I had anything so interesting to say that I could tweet multiple times a day and people would follow me, so I moved on. And no offense twitterers, but as far as I can tell it hasn’t changed much, if at all.

So before I wrote this I wanted to see if anyone else out there thought the same, and low and behold the first result Google spits out for “twitter is shit” is this http://www.bannerblog.com.au/news/2009/01/twitter_is_shit_at.php, and it was only written last month. And reading it I think Ashley is pointing out everything that I found wrong with Twitter when I first looked into it way back when. In fact the first thing I noticed when I joined is that it wouldn’t even let me create my full username. For better of for worse since many years ago I am londonstreetlife online, for all my profiles that’s me. But Twitter only allows for 15 characters and sadly I’m 16, so now I’ve become @londonstreetlif in the twittersphere :( And I get why, a point that the article makes, you can only Twitter a max of 140 characters, so a tweet would be taken up with @everyones_name and not much space left for anything else. Just to be clear I get that Ashley doesn’t actually think Twitter is shit, in fact she admits she’s quite addicted to it, just that she recognizes some major flaws.

I guess my main rant with Twitter is that people are using it to shamelessly brand themselves, b-list and has-been (or never-will-be) celebrities cling to it for dear fame. And corporations are using it as some sort of Q&A medium and as proof that they are transparent, there are much better platforms out there to achieve this, and as far as transparency goes, I sit behind the curtain and I know that there is a wall of lawyers and the whole transparency thing is pretty much an illusion.

So I have taken the plunge and joined because an upcoming project requires me to know the basics of Twitter, which I shamefully didn’t, or at least I thought I didn’t but after having now joined I might take that back, it is very very basic after all.

Right now I guess I can’t really judge Twitter too much because I’m so new to it. I’ve known about it for as long as it’s been about but until now I’ve not immersed myself into it so I don’t know what it’s like to follow and be followed, or to tweet my every thought and whim to my hearts content. And I get that I probably will get into it, and become addicted to it, just like many of my friends who are highly intelligent yet swear by it. But I just think at the same time I will always think it’s a bit shit.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Tags: Social Media, Twitter | 23 Comments »

Newer Entries »