No. Learning a new skill is hard. Evidentially, twitter is too hard for some people. Robert Llewellyn was rightly confused when he saw this... What Had Happened? Turns out, the BBC had read a tweet to Robert Llewellyn and mistaken it for a tweet by him Everything Electric SHOW & EXPO@Everyth1ngElecI think they should be on #BBCqt, I know the oxygen of publicity argument but I believe 90% of people will see the truth of their hate❤️ 0💬 0🔁 014:17 - Thu 22 October 2009Dave@dfliteReplying t…
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I've been thinking about James Whatley's discussion asking When does Batman sleep? Here's the pull-quote... Sometimes Brian, I find myself stuck in front of the laptop at like 10pm on a Sunday night. The kids are in bed, the wife isn’t far behind and there I am answering customer care questions over Twitter with some guy in Geneva! This isn’t my day job. I’m a developer. My question to you is sir; when does Batman sleep? I find myself in a somewhat similar position. My twitter account, like th…
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Vodafone Update is a combined Twitter, Twitpic and Facebook client for smartphones. I rarely comment on Vodafone specific topics, but as I've already reviewed Dabr and UberTwitter - it would be a shame to leave out Vodafone Update. The usual disclaimer applies - I work for Vodafone Group, but I do not speak for them. Vodafone Update was developed by Vodafone Germany - I don't think I know anyone involved with it though. First, a word of warning. Because this application was developed by…
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I've decided to add a preview of YouTube videos into Dabr, the mobile Twitter service. The code is fairly simple - although I still suck at regular expressions. if (preg_match_all('#youtube.com/watch?v=([_-dw]+)#', $tmp, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER) > 0) { foreach ($matches[1] as $match) { $images[] = theme('external_link', "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v={$match}", "<img src='http://i.ytimg.com/vi/{$match}/1.jpg' class='twitpic' />"); } } Here's how it looks. A user writes a …
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I hate shortened URLs with a passion. It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before. If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went. So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes those horrid little links and turns them in to full sized URLs. Here's the basic code in PHP to use the service. function long_url($shortURL) { //Use the LongURLPlease API $url = "…
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It's been a long time since my last post about Twitter on the BlackBerry. Back then I concluded that Dabr wasn't quite up to snuff - how wrong I was! In the last year it has come on leaps and bounds. I've even contributed a few suggestions and lines of code. Without a doubt, Dabr is the best general mobile web client for Twitter. As my main device is a BlackBerry, I wanted something that integrated a little better. The Facebook app hooks in with email, calendar and even adds profile pictures …
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There has been much discussion recently as to whether the BNP are becoming more acceptable to mainstream voters. Are people really happy to let the world know that they support the BNP and their policies? Will they publicly show their allegiance on a social networking site like twitter? Do you know how many of your twitter friends are racists? There are two ways to tell: Directly. You see them saying something racist. In which case, I'd hope you either call them on it or you block them. …
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Woooo! Twestival! YAYAYAYAY! Errr... Well, no. Not really. After the success of last year's London Twestival, I thought this one would be even better. Looks like I was wrong. Let's start with...The GoodOnce again, it's impossible to feel anything other that gratitude and humbleness in the face of the sheer amount of effort, determination and self-sacrifice that goes in to making a "happening" on this scale. Kudos to Amanda, Ben and everyone else who worked so hard.Getting people all over the …
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This is my reply to an excellent BitchBuzz article on high profile brands on twitter. I reproduced it here because their comments form ate my HTML... ~~~ Thanks for the plug. Just to make it clear, my twitter presence is my own and not an official Vodafone channel. That said, I'm always happy to answer questions about mobile, portals & widgets - Vodafone or not. I do run an official twitter presence @HomepageBeta which is for Vodafone's new portal. I think it's hard for (European)…
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One of the great things about the Internet and Peer-to-Peer technologies is that they are decentralised. If one part of the net goes down - the rest pulls together and manages. If a box somewhere dies, other boxes should take over until it can be fixed.Grimly, we can apply this as an analogy to our real life social networks. If your good friend Fred were to suddenly die - you could still contact all your other friends. You could even contact - with a bit of effort - those people who you only…
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Twitter == Addictive. CrackBerry == Addictive. Twitter + BlackBerry == toxic levels of addictivenessicity. This is a quick review of some of the mobile Twitter interfaces and how well they work on the BlackBerry. I'm just looking at mobile web interfaces (for now). Mobile Twitter First off - the official mobile Twitter interface - http://m.twitter.com It's fairly plain and uninteresting. At the bottom of the screen, we see a few options. You can even perform basic follow / unfollow…
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