In 2009, Kosso and I petitioned Twitter to allow us to search for Tweets by their "in reply to" ID. The idea was that developers could created a properly threaded view of conversations. Of course, Twitter being ultra-responsive to developers, did absolutely nothing. Skip three years into the future, and App.net is providing all the API goodness that Twitter doesn't. This means that we can easily create new ways to view conversations. So that is exactly what I've done. You can play with…
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Regular readers will know that I think Woking Council's subsidy of curchgoers is ridiculous, illegal, and unfair. It's an issue I've raised with local councillor Carl Thomson in writing and on Twitter. A few days ago I entered into a discussion with him online about the issue. He has since deleted the tweets. But, as we know, the Internet has a long memory - so here they are. I've reordered a few to make our conversation clearer. None of my tweets have been deleted. It started when I saw…
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Did you know that you can to link to a specific Tweet on Twitter? The URL looks like this: https://twitter.com/#!/edent/status/197967209459499008 Pretty obviously, that's the user's name and the ID of their tweet. Simple, right? Not really, click on that link and you'll see this: That's my name in the URL bar - but the Number 10 Press Office's tweet on the page. What's Going On? Have I retweeted that status? Nope! Am I a 1337 h4x0r who has hacked Number 10? No sir! Is the screenshot a…
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OAuth was designed to combat an anti-pattern. Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it's a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that's just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an untrusted site! So, that's why we use OAuth. Rather than handing details to a random site, we authenticate against a trusted site which then redirects us back with an authentication token. That's all well…
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On Thursday, I attended my first TeaCamp. It's a mini-meetup for UK Gov folk doing interesting digital things. These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rules. Social Media is a problem for all organisations - whether public or private. Rightly or wrongly, the "public" see an organisation as having a single mind and a single focus. Anything which gives the impression of a lack of unit…
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As Twitter now have a UK office, I thought I would see what data they hold about me. Thanks to the UK's Data Protection act, it's really simple to request the information. I wasn't expecting a whole CD's worth of information - like Facebook provides users - but what I did get surprised me. Twitter UK has no control or responsibility over the user information in the Twitter service and cannot respond to these sorts of requests. So, I was rather surprised to see Privacy International…
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UPDATE! I have reached a settlement with Sky. Update: 16 March, 2011. They have finally paid up! tl;dr Sky News stole my copyrighted work and distributed it without credit or payment. I asked them to pay £1,500. They refused. Full Story During the recent O2 brouhaha I recorded a video showing how the issue could affect people. I deliberately gave it the standard YouTube licence rather than the Creative Commons licence. Later that evening, I was alerted to the fact that Sky News had …
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According to faux-influence-measument site, Klout, I was influential on Verizon Droid Stock Market Hotels Errr.....? What? If you're following me on Twitter for any of the above, perhaps you'd like to consider your life choices. So, I opted-out of Klout. Their opt-out page is full of feel-good nonsense to try and convince people not to remove their own profile. It didn't work on me. They asked for my reasons for leaving, and this is what I told them: Three reasons. 1) You…
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Summary Twitter's way of linking URLs is broken. It's annoying to users, and a pain in the arse to developers. This quick post talks about the problem and offers a solution. I've raised a bug with Twitter and I hope you'll star it as important to you. (more…) …
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I spotted this poster today, encouraging people to search for the Twitter hashtag "#Transformers". Wouldn't it make sense to use a QR code as well? That way people could quickly scan, and be taken straight to the discussion, rather than have to fire up Twitter and do a manual search. As it happens, it's slightly tricky to make a QR code which searches for a Twitter hashtag. There are two things to note: Twitter's search URLs are annoyingly different from every other search URL on the …
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What happens to your social media profile when you change jobs? Recently, the BBC's Laura Kunessberg announced she was heading off to ITV. Laura Kuenssberg@ITVLauraKAs you've discovered I will become @ITVLauraK in September! Thanks for all the lovely tweets - Back in Westminster tomorrow❤️ 2💬 86🔁 013:31 - Wed 22 June 2011 Which got me wondering. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentWhy doesn't @bbclaurak simply rename her account to @ITVLauraK in September? Or are her followers the BBC's proper…
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Twitter has announced that it will soon open up a native photo sharing service. Rather than using an external service like Embed.ly to retrieve thumbnails, all the data is embedded within Twitter Entities. So, if you request a status using "include_entities=true", you will be able to grab the image and display the thumbnail using the following code. function twitter_get_media($status) { if($status->entities->media) { $url = $status->entities->media[0]->media_url_https; …
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