Previously on Terence Eden's blog... About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like. Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project! TweeView.ml Here are a few screenshots of "interesting" trees, and a little bit about how it works. In this example, the user has a main thread that they are posting on: You can see that a few people…
Continue reading →
Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go! So, what's going on? As I've previously blogged about, Twitter has a new conversations API. That allows you to get Tweet replies in a tree-like structure. A small conversation looks something like this: …
Continue reading →
I have my Twitter Tick™ because I'm a mediocre white man in the tech industry. No joke. During one of Twitter's periodic bouts of opening up their verification programme, I applied and basically said "Don't you know who I am??!" and got it. Sucks to be anyone other than me, I guess. Twitter has paused the Verification process for now. In part, I suspect, due to overwhelming false positives and negatives. The main problem, I think, is that no one knows what "Verified" means. Is the user a c…
Continue reading →
I received a rather distraught DM from a Twitter friend last week. They were upset that I was following an account which did nothing but spew out racist bile all day long. Did this mean that I endorsed their hateful views. I was confused. I didn't recognise the specific account, and didn't recall seeing any of their tweets - but I was following them. How? Why? Was it a hack? I did a little digging, and finally it twigged... The account belonged to someone I met at an industry event several…
Continue reading →
Every so often, a celebrity is castigated over their "youthful indiscretions" i.e. racist Tweets they sent when they were a teenager. I don't think I've posted anything too horrific, but I wanted to check. I searched Twitter for a variety of slurs sent from my account - and all seemed clean. But... there's a lot of stuff that's not so easy to find with a simple search. So I decided to read every single Tweet I'd written since 2008. That's a lot of crap to wade through! I built a site -…
Continue reading →
Twitter has never really solved its spam problem. It is a constant irritation that ordinary people get booted off the service for minor infractions, while large spam rings go unpunished. For the past few months, some of my old tweets have been getting liked by random women. I'm sure you've see something similar. The idea is, I suppose, to arouse your curiosity. "Who is this young woman showering me with attention? I'd better check her profile!" Gosh! Young, pretty, single, and she's…
Continue reading →
Twitter's trending topics are... inflammatory. Probably deliberately so in order to drive engagement. It's a mix of "who shall we hate today" and lowest-common-denominator "celebrity" gossip. I hate it. There are various ways you can block content on the web - but they usually involve installing a plugin to your browser. Here's a simple hack to remove the sidebar - or, at the very least, make it a lot less annoying. Go to twitter.com/settings/explore Set the location to a city whose…
Continue reading →
Recently, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter was hijacked. It was turned into a PS5 giveaway scam. The people who hijacked the account changed the name, avatar, and deleted all the previous Tweets. Here's how I found who the original owner was, and managed to contact them. A Twitter account has a screen name. Mine is @edent. It is possible to change your screen name. Each Twitter account has a unique user ID. This is a numerical code that the API uses to keep track of users. Mine is…
Continue reading →
One of the problems with OEmbeds of Tweets is that they're heavy. Lots of JavaScript, tracking cookies, and other detritus. See this excellent post by Matt Hobbs looking at how to make your website faster by removing Twitter embeds and replacing them with images. Here's my attempt to turn a Tweet into a semantic SVG! This doesn't attempt to faithfully recreate the exact look and feel of an authentic Tweet. But it is designed to be a small, fast, and semantic representation. Here's what it…
Continue reading →
I like quoting people's Tweets in my blog posts. But, sometimes, people delete their Tweets. This blog post examines two questions. How to preserve Tweets in blog posts that they are still readable even after the user deletes them. Whether this is morally acceptable behaviour. Let's tackle the easy question first. Preserving Tweets Using the WordPress OEmbed feature, I can just paste in a URl like https://twitter.com/katebevan/status/1345669092229992448 And have it appear as a fully…
Continue reading →
One of the things I loved about Facebook was its "On This Day" feature. There's something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Twitter doesn't have anything like that. So I built it. Introducing - Twistory.ml Note: Twitter's recent changes means this no longer works. Stick your @ name in, hit the big button, and you'll get a list of everything you said on this day in previous years. The code is open on GitLab. It's not the prettiest site, …
Continue reading →
It's always fun to look back at the predictions ancient man made about life in the future. 11 years ago today, Loïc Le Meur wrote 30 predictions for the future of Twitter (Video of the talk). This is a non-snarky look at those predictions. Not to ridicule his ideas, but to understand the errors made in order to help up make better predictions. 1. It will reach masses of people Yes! Perhaps not the whole world, but it is obvious a mass medium. 2. They won’t use
the same tools as we do …
Continue reading →
