I run lots of automated Twitter accounts - "bots" in common parlance. But there's no way for people to know that these are automated accounts. This leads to slightly odd situations where people try to have conversations with them. Colours by @edent@RGB_Colours Automated"Dark Slate Blue"#483d8b pic.x.com/vi2novdlgr❤️ 54💬 0🔁 1505:30 - Tue 24 August 2021waaaaahat @ Spoutible@waaaaahatReplying to @…
Continue reading →
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. …
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…
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 n…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Continue reading →
