Twitter makes a lot of money out of me. At least, I assume so. The code I helped write, and the sites I run, are used by millions of Tiwtter's users. I've sent a tonne of traffic their way, and what has Twitter given me? Not even a "thank you." Seriously, no one from Twitter has ever said "Thanks for all the customers. Thanks for helping develop our presence in certain markets. Thanks writing tools that keep our users playing on our service. Thanks!" Compare and contrast to App.net. The …
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So, I stayed up bashing my head against a brick wall all last night! PHP's string functions aren't (yet) UTF-8 aware. This is a replacement for subtr_replace which should work on UTF-8 Strings: function utf8_substr_replace($original, $replacement, $position, $length) { $startString = mb_substr($original, 0, $position, "UTF-8"); $endString = mb_substr($original, $position + $length, mb_strlen($original), "UTF-8"); $out = $startString . $replacement . $endString; return $out; …
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In 2009, Kosso and I petitioned Twitter to allow us to search for Tweets by their "in reply to" ID. The idea was that developers could created a properly threaded view of conversations. Of course, Twitter being ultra-responsive to developers, did absolutely nothing. Skip three years into the future, and App.net is providing all the API goodness that Twitter doesn't. This means that we can easily create new ways to view conversations. So that is exactly what I've done. You can play with…
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tl;dr - Excluding people, even with a "nominal" fee is exclusionary, and that can be a problem. Before reading this post, you may want to understand what I mean by "privilege". You should also understand where you are on The Global Rich List. The heavy-handed schmaltz that is Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom made an excellent point on its final episode. Voter registration which requires a driving licence is a racist policy. For a privileged guy like myself, it seems like the simplest thing in the…
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