This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I've done. It's a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets. < p>The Twitter Engineering Blog That's all well and good, but as I d…
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What is "Implicit Knowledge"? Essentially it's stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it's something that people have worked out through their own experiences. This sort of knowledge is common in life - but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received. Mark Hawkins …
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There are many "rules" when it comes to User Interface / User Experience design. One that I try to stick to is "Don't let users do things they can't do." It's one of my gripes with Linux. If you're editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input - often without knowing what the limits are. Take these two different examples. In a text file, we might have: …
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Blah blah Twitter.... Blah Blah BlackBerry... Blah Blah.... http://www.blackberry.com/twitter NB1: I primarily use SocialScope on my BlackBerry. SocialScope's terms of use prohibit me from showing screenshots of their beta. Hey, guys, I want to show everyone how great you are! NB2: Screenshots taken on a BlackBerry 9000 running OS 5.0 First Impressions I've never understood the need for a…
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As any student of computer science knows, line breaks are confusing. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML? This was a problem I faced when trying to get Dabr to render the ASCII art produced by Aral…
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Twitter have announced that all third party site will have to use OAuth. You will no longer be able to just type in your username and password to get access to Twitter via your favourite web client. Usually, I would be a big fan of this move - especially if it forces password anti-pattern sites like TwitPic to implement the new, secure standard. This means that you won't be able to log in to a …
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I'm a big fan of OAuth - despite some claims to the contrary. It's an excellent way of teaching people not to stick their username and password into any old site which asks for it. Which is why I'm so incredibly disappointed in Twitter's implementation of mobile OAuth. For a service which started out operating by SMS, Twitter takes a surprisingly unenlightened view of mobile. It's main mobile …
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I've written a very basic JIL widget to launch dabr. You can grab it from shkspr.mobi/Dabr.wgt I've tested this to work on the Vodafone 360 H1 - but it should work with any JIL handset. Because it isn't certified, you may need to dial *#35767# to remove the H1's security check. The code is very simple. The JIL SDK allows you to call specific phone application - in this case, all I've done i…
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BBH Labs - a marketing agency's "Skunkworks" - recently blogged about using QR Codes to send messages via Twitter. There approach was interesting, but as I commented, there are ways to improve it. If you scan in the above QR code, it will take you to Twitter and pre-populate your status with "@edent". You can, of course, set it to be any message you like. There are two key things to remember …
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Seesmic, a service I've not tried before, have released a Twitter client for the BlackBerry. Is it any good? How does it compare with the features of Dabr or the usability of UberTwitter? Find out! Getting the client was fairly simple, but could be better. Simply visiting http://seesmic.com was enough to bring up a mobile friendly page with download instructions. However, scrolling down…
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When I was a fresher at university, Mitch Benn played the union. I don't remember why I didn't go. I do remember being woken up by the guys in my halls banging on my door telling me that I'd missed a brilliant evening. The CDs that they bought back from the gig were hilarious - the perfect antidote to looming finals. Since missing him play 10 years ago, I've caught up with him on The Now Sh…
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Twitter has a gaping security hole. Changing your password won't stop malicious users logging in as you! I received a rather worrying email from Twitter. Apparently they thought my password had been compromised and needed to be reset. Reset Your Twitter Password After checking to see if it was valid, I went and changed my password. Any site which relied on a cookie to post to Twitter would h…
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