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Posts Tagged ‘ Twitter ’

Twitter finally rewards the biggest twits!

February 7, 2010 by Fabrizio
Twitter finally rewards the biggest twits!

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!

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Subscribe on Twitter and Facebook

February 1, 2010 by Fabrizio
Subscribe on Twitter and Facebook

Before now you have been able to subscribe to me on twitter, however when doing this, you would get ALL of my updates and this was not convenient for those who were only interested in updates from my blog or to use the twitter subscription, purely as a way of subscribing to the blog. You can now follow @flungoBlog on twitter to get the latest updates from my blog. There has also now been a Facebook page set up which will also host links to new blog posts.

This now provides readers with 4 ways to subscribe to this blog:

The Facebook page and Twitter Page will not have updates posted for a month or more, but feel free to subscribe via either of those methods!

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Twitter penalise dedicated Twitter users

January 9, 2010 by Fabrizio
Twitter penalise dedicated Twitter users

I was happily tweeting away yesterday when all of a sudden, TweetDeck started giving me a “Recipient not following you” error which is what TweetDeck’s last resort error is; if it does not recognise the error that has been returned it will return that error! Strangely TweetDeck have’t got an error message simply saying “An unknown error occurred” but this blog is not about the issues with TweetDeck (which I love dearly but being in Beta, obviously has bugs). At the time, I was ReTweeting and one of the common errors that I get that TweetDeck (once again strangely does not recognise), is the error that the Tweet I am trying to ReTweet has already been Tweeted by me!

At first I took this as the case and tried to ReTweet something else. I got the same error again! I knew for a fact that I had not already Tweeted this and then attempted to send a normal Tweet. I cannot remember if I got the “Recipient not following you” or another undescriptive error (however I am pretty sure it was that same old “Recipient not following you” error) but at that point I presumed TweetDeck had stopped working (as it had done the week before). To check that it was TweetDeck and not that twitter was having issues (which I doubted as I was still receiving Tweets on TweetDeck, which was what happened with the problem I had with TweetDeck the week before) I went on to Twitter and successfully send a Tweet.

From this I presumed it was the same problem as before and thought I would have to close TweetDeck and open it to rectify the problem (as I did last time) but before I could do that, I had to RT anything that had been loaded up in to TweetDeck already and reply to any tweets that were loaded and required a reply so I opened all those tweets on the web in multiple tabs, doing 5 at a time (so that my computer would not get filled with open tabs and end up confusing me) and I then clicked ReTweet on each and then confirmed it quickly changing between tabs in an attempt to get though it all quickly. When I returned to the first tweet that I ReTweeted to confirm that it had been ReTweeted, I could not see any sign that it had been successfully ReTweeted so clicked ReTweet again, and went to then next tab which had the same problem but by the time I reached the third one I realised something was up so clicked ReTweet then remained on that tab until I received an error message. After a few seconds of attempting to ReTweet, low and behold a message pops up at the top saying “whoops! Something went wrong, please refresh the page and try again”

Initially I did not associate this problem with the problem I was having on TweetDeck so refreshed all the open tabs and had a look if it had made any difference. It had not so I then tried again getting the same message each time! Since I was able to Tweet, I presumed there was a problem with the Twitter ReTweet function , but when I went to make a tweet asking about this, I was greeted with the following error:

I was shocked by this and it resulted in me having to stop tweeting for over an hour! I totally understand why Rate Limits are in place but I find that is penalising the dedicate users of twitter. If you look at my recent TweetStats you will notice that I tweet over 2000 times a month and in my opinion this show true dedication to the service. In my opinion, Twitter need to improve their data centres to accommodate larger rate limits. If twitter require more funding to provide this to their users I would be more than willing to pay an additional fee to have raised API limits! Just to clarify, I do not think twitter should charge for their service but I think that those who want higher rate limits should be able to pay and receive this!

Twitter do currently offer Whitelisting which raises API calls to up to 20,000 a day but this is only for developers and applications in production and will only affect the API calls and not the Update Limit.

The one thing that has really got me confused on this situation is the actual guidelines on the limits. The Update and API Limits state that you are limited to “1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )” However, if you look at my statistics for yesterday, you will see I was no where near this limit!

Admittedly, I was tweeting (well ReTweeting) at a rapid rate but if there is an additional limit which is on a per hour basis that would affect that, it should stated in the Update and API Limits.

I am still very confused about this but I have to live with this! Have any of you ever got that error? Please leave your comments :)

Popularity: 37% [?]

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My self harming habits…

January 9, 2010 by Fabrizio
My self harming habits…

The following Tweets are tweets describing how I made lunch on the 12th of December 2009 and about the events that occurred at this time. I apologise for the delay in making this blog post, the reason was because it took me a long time to compile the tweets and format them :) Please read and enjoy

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Google and Twitter: Together at last!

December 15, 2009 by Fabrizio
Google and Twitter: Together at last!

I just did a random search on Google (can’t remember what for) and discovered a nifty new feature! If you search for the user name of someone on twitter on Google, then Google will recognise this and automatically add a box at the top for a select few of the user’s most recent tweets of that user. Here is a screenshot of when you search for flungo on Google:

As you can see it will only show two updates and these updates may not necessarily be the 2 most recent. After being amazed by just the fact tweet were appearing on twitter, I noticed that there was a link that said, “Pause” and to me this implied that search was live! I tried testing this by making some for some reason (which I am yet to discover – if you know please comment) some of my tweets were omitted even after refreshing and these tweets never appeared on this page; Google must be using some sort of filtering to try and offer the most reliable tweets.

Rather than messily extending down the page (which would be inconvenient for those who don’t wish to use this feature) when the page starts to load more tweets and updates, Google shows them but limits the size of the area, and adds a nice little scroll bar if it exceeds that area. An example of this is bellow when @MOn321 sent me a tweet. :P

Even though not all tweets are show, you can view more tweets by clicking, “Latest updates for…”. By clicking this you will get a live search page that searches for you query:

This view will display any tweets that contain your query. This view is accessible from any search (even if Google does not automatically show the updates on your main search) by clicking, “Show options…” at the top of the search then selecting “Updates” from the list of search types.

I then decided to search for something that may find a few more results so I did a search for something that has been in the news for quite a while, “Tiger Woods“. Although the Latest Results did not appear at the top of the page it did appear but further down the page. It must use a similar ranking system to when positioning result in accordance to relevance. When I scrolled down, I instantly notice that the update was definitely live with updates coming in every few seconds and that this feature was not just limited Twitter; news sites and other sites that constantly have updates posted at a very fast rate were also being loaded in real time!

To just see the sheer number of tweets that it could build up I left the page searching for “Tiger Woods” for a little while (it ended up being approximately 15 minutes). Google ended up finding so many results that the screenshot is almost 6000 pixels long. For this reason, I am displaying just a thumbnail of the photo on the right however you can click to vie the whole picture :)

Overall this looks like a very powerful tool and a step in the correct direction for real-time search for one of the world largest search engines!

Popularity: 14% [?]

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Melissa Ambrose’s Blog

November 1, 2009 by Fabrizio

This is just going to be a quick little blog to tell you that my best friend, @MelissaAmbrose_ was inspired by me to get a blog of her own. Unfortunately she went for “blogspot” which is not one of the top blogging software but considering she wont probably blog that much so it probably will make no difference (but I hope to be proved wrong)!

Her blog can be found here and I urge you to check it out cos if her blog is popular, she will have to make blog posts! Please visit her blog and leave her comments of love :P

I will now add her blog to my blogroll! :)

Popularity: 78% [?]

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Automatically ReTweet Another Twitter

October 4, 2009 by Fabrizio
Automatically ReTweet Another Twitter

This is a quick blog explaining how you can use Yahoo Pipes and twitterfeed.com to automatically RT tweets from another account! The pipe used in this tutorial will be the first of many pipes that I Have designed that will appear on Twitter-Pipes.com which should be set up soon.

This pipe is designed to take any twitter feed then convert it for use on twitter feed for the purpose of automatically RTing another accounts tweets. This pipe automatically turns the tweet into a RT so that when it is posted the original author is given credit.

The first step required is to get the Twitter Feed URL. To do this, go to the twitter profile you wish to AutoRT then find where it says ‘RSS feed of flungo’s tweets‘ (with the user name changed for the whichever profile you are viewing). If you are having difficulty finding this link, view the screenshot bellow:

Once you have found this link there are 2 ways to get the Twitter Feed URL. If you are using a modern browser (like Google Chome or Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox) you can right click and you should be able to find something like ‘Copy Link Address’ or ‘Copy Link Location’. If you cannot do this then click the link and just copy the URL from your browser’s address bar.

Once you have this URL on your clipboard you will then have to go to the Twitter RT Feed Pipe and paste the Twitter Feed URL on your clipboard, into the Twitter Feed URL (see screenshot bellow – 1) then click ‘Run Pipe’. After the pipe has successfully run, you then need to find the link to the Pipe RSS Feed (see screenshot bellow – 2) and copy the URL as you did for the Twitter Feed URL.

Now that you have that link copied you need to go to twitterfeed.com. After you have logged in or registered and gone to your DashboardDashboard reviews you will need to click ‘Create New Feed‘. You then need to click ‘Connect your feed to your Twitter Account’ and follow the instructions to connect the feed to your twitter. One you are logged in you will need to set a ‘Feed Name’ and paste the Pipe RSS link into the ‘RSS Feed URL’ box. You will then need to configure the advanced settings as follows:

After clicking save, you should be all set-up and ready to go! :)

Popularity: 44% [?]

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Where is my Google Wave Account?

October 2, 2009 by Fabrizio

I have been trying for months to get my Google Wave account and am now starting to give up hope! The big hype about Google Wave started on the Thursday 28th May when the product was announced on Day 2 of the Google I/O event. The product was unveiled in the morning keynotes at approximately 9am and at that point the web went crazy over this product. Everyone at the event was twittering and blogging away about Google Wave and the hype began. If you have not seen the keynotes from this day or want to know more about what Google Wave is, I recommend you watch this YouTube video:

You can also find more information on Google Wave from here.

As soon as I had watched all of this video, I started my mission to get a Google Wave account! within an hour I had filled out the following forms with great detail:

At this point, I just waited…. And waited…. And waited until I could not take it and made a few stroppy tweets about how I wanted my Google Wave account ASAP! I then got a response from Christine Tsai who I believe works for Google (well she had an @google.com email so that was kind of obvious :P )

“Brilliant,”, I thought, “finally getting somewhere!”

After exchanging som DMs on Twitter we eventually started emailing and eventually the followign conclusion was made:
Hey Fabrizio,

It doesn’t look like you registered or attended Google I/O. Please note that right now, Wave sandbox accounts were only given to I/O attendees and that’s what I was checking for on Twitter. If you signed up on https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/, you’ll be notified when it’s available for you.

Thanks
Christine
I though, “Fair enough,” and just kept waiting!

A couple of months later on Monday the 20th July, I got the following email:
Hi,

You are being sent this mail because you requested access to the Google
Wave Developer Sandbox. If you would still like a Google Wave Developer
Sandbox account, please fill in this linked form:

http://wave.google.com/signups/signup1.html

After filling in this form, you should receive a mail with your account
details within a few days.

Hope to see you on Google Wave soon,

- The Google Wave Team
I was finally close to having my Google Wave account! :D I eagerly filled out the form and waited a bit longer!

I presumed that Google would be swamped with accounts to set up and that it may take some time but after 6 days I tried to contact someone. Sicne then I have received no replies or any contact from Google and my account was never set up :(

Hopefully someone at Google finds this blog post and can get me an invite to the real google wave which is now running!

Popularity: -0% [?]

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Many Thanks to Emma Springer

September 26, 2009 by Fabrizio
Many Thanks to Emma Springer

For being the first person post a legitimate comment on here, EmmaEmma reviews has won the amazing secret prize of getting a little blog post about being the first person to comment on my site! Wow…. A truly epic prize, I know! So many thanks to Emma and I hope to be seeing more comments soon! :)

If you were wondering the definition of “a legitimate comment” is a comment that is not:

  • written by me
  • posted automatically
  • spam

Popularity: 2% [?]

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New Login System for my Blog!

September 3, 2009 by Fabrizio

Over the last few days I have been slowly sorting the login and authentication methods for my site. Yesterday I added the plugin that allows me to control logins from all the external sites which I have now successfully set up and have today finished configuring it all!

You can now login using, Google, Windows Live, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. I have fully tested all of them for their main purpose which is so you can post comments without registering for an account here, but if you don’t have any of the accounts listed I recommend getting a Google account!

I hope you guys all like this new form of authentication and can all use it to comment back to my posts! If any of you experience a problem or glitch, comment it bellow! :)

Popularity: 100% [?]

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