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 …
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A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back over them, this one struck me as being a lot less crap than others. Terence Eden is on…
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Twitter has a nifty new feature which allows you to schedule the publication of a Tweet. But, crucially, it doesn't let the reader know when the message was originally written. How can you, as a publisher, prove that you wrote a scheduled Tweet at a specific time? Here's one method. Write a Tweet which contains a timestamp - "This is my message 2020-08-17" Generate a hash of the message -…
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My mate Dom was moaning to his ISP on Twitter. They sent him a private message so they could look into his account. Blimey! Thankfully, that was a pretty brazen and inept attempt at phishing. Anyone asking for all your card details like that should set the alarm bells ringing. Of course, phishers often target credulous people who don't understand that they're being scammed. By sending an…
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One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available - the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread. Long time readers know that I've long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As trailed in their recent blogpost - conversation threading is now part of the official API! This allows you to…
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I wanted to see what I was Tweeting on this exact day last year. And all the years before. So I built a website! It's a disgusting hack, and I'm truly sorry for unleashing it on you. Using the API You can't. The Twitter search API only goes back 7 days. This whole idea would be much easier if I had access to the Premium API. But! The Twitter website has no such restrictions. Advanced Search …
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I'm not sure if I'm the first person to do this - but I'm going to claim credit anyway! Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentHello! This Tweet has been signed with my PGP Key. pic.x.com/ed4rcldlvw❤️ 35💬 7🔁 008:03 - Thu 14 May 2020 You can verify by pasting the alt text into keybase.io/verify - or by using your favourite command line tool. Back in 2017, I wondered if Twitter's alt text could be (ab)…
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Twitter's search interface has all sorts of lovely and obscure options. My three favourites are "min_retweets:", "min_replies:", and "min_faves:" Using those filters, you can create a search for Tweets which meet a certain threshold. For example, here are my Tweets which have been liked more than 500 times: twitter.com/search?q=from:edent min_faves:500 Here are the ones which have been…
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There are lots of celelbrities and famous academics on Twitter. Then there's Professor Richard Feynman. Who died in 1988. Every so often, one of "his" pearls of wisdom is regurgitated into my Twitter feed. Prof. Feynman@ProfFeynmanWhen you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others.It's the same thing when you are stupid.❤️ 18,772💬 132🔁 013:57 - Sat 22 February 2020 Except…
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Way back when Blackberry was the smartphone, my team at Vodafone obsessed over the idea of the "Unified Inbox". "What if," the marketing chaps said, "you could see all your notifications in one place!" Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were in the same list. It was a lovely idea. And users all…
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Once in a while, I'll see someone Tweet a "link" to file:///C:/users/... - that's the Microsoft Windows way of representing a location on a filesystem. Usually this means that the user has tried to either drag 'n' drop something, or copied a link from their file explorer. There are some (mild) infosec risks you should be aware of. Find local user names - this shows you what their username is…
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How many characters can a Tweet contain? It used to be 140, back in the good old days. Now it's 280. Unless you're Japanese. Let me explain… I run OpenBenches - a site which collects memorial benches. When a user adds a bench, the inscription is automatically Tweeted. If the inscription is longer than 280 characters, it is truncated. The PHP code to truncate text to a specific length is p…
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