Archive for February 7th, 2010

After reading a blog post that I found when it was ReTweeted by @windowsphone, I discovered the Odiogo plugin for wordpress. It is a nifty little plugin that you can install onto your wordpress blog which allows your, more lazy readers have each blog post read to them.

What you get is the standard sort of robotic voice (after a little Odiogo jingle for branding ) reading the blog post. The quality is quite good and can be very fluent at times but is nowhere near perfect. It does try and be natural but siome times the tone used is all wrong and in very logn sentences where a pause would be used even where there are no commas, the reader picks up in pace and it becomes very fast!

The main problems comes when you start having abreviations for things or non-english words (which is very often on a technology blog like this). Sometimes it will try and make the abreviations into a word rather than spelling it letter by letter and other times you get the oposite; you may have a word in capitals which it assumes is an abreviation and so reads letter by letter!

Overall the Odigio plugin is a nice feature which I will leave running but it is nowhere near perfect!

On Friday the 5th of February, at about 6/7pm GMT there appeared to be a strange anomaly going round on twitter! People who already had high tweet counts were suddenly getting even higher ones! I first notice this when reading a tweet from @MOn321 on twitter! My initial reaction was “WTH? I could have sworn that @MOn321 only had 12,000 tweets or something likt that the other day and there is no way he could have tweeted 24,000 times in the space of a week without me noticing!”

I was right! There was no possible way that he could have tweeted that much! When @MOn321 told me that it was a glitch I was highly jealous of him and way wondering what had happened until @MOn321 noted that the same glitch had affected me in a much larger way!!!

At this point I had to do some investigating! Was this glitch affecting everyone? What were the exact details of the glitch!

From what I could tell, it appeared that the glitch affected users with a tweet count greater than about 2,000-5,000(I would have needed a snapshot of before and after the glitch to be more precise) and it trippled the users tweet count and the moment of the glitch occurring!I have no indication as to whether it has any relation to the API and whether it did not affect users using the web or not but if you have any information, please leave it in the comments bellow!

Most user are finding this annoying but I am satisfied with this as compensation for the way that twitter normally penalises its most dedicated users!