Twitter v. Facebook – A Social Media Deathmatch

A long time ago I wrote a post that I’ve been meaning to counter for some time now but I just hadn’t known how to tackle it.  But the other day I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who doesn’t use Twitter, and like just about everyone that doesn’t tweet he also thinks it’s kinda shit.  He was saying stuff like “isn’t Twitter just the status message of Facebook?” (my second ever tweet!…) and I was like “holy crap, I’m having a conversation with myself 8 months ago”, I was talking to the me that wrote

Changing your Twitter name? Watch out!

It’s cool that Twitter lets you change your Twitter name, there’s not a lot of apps that I can think of that allow that. But at the same time there should be a big fat warning sign when you do.  It’s no biggie, I’m not trying to scare you away from doing it or anything,  I had to change mine fairly recently (basically my old name sucked) and I’m glad I did, Twitter switches over all your friends and followers automatically so no issues there, but there are a few things that you should bear in mind before you do:…

TweetDeck iPhone app #fail

All the hype around the TweetDeck iPhone app lately has been kind of bugging me, and the last straw is this… article I read yesterday, frankly it’s bothered me.  It’s not up to me to decide what they think is a badass iPhone app, but they include TweetDeck in the list and the only thing they say about it is “obviously”.  Obviously what exactly?
Ordinarily I wouldn’t even say anything, TweetDeck is free after all.  Aesthetically it’s beautiful, and as an iPhone app in many ways it stands out as brilliant, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies the iPhone offers,

Will the real Augmented Reality please stand up?

People we gotta come up with a new name for augmented reality. That’s the real next big thing and it’s waaaay dope but it’s name has been hijacked by a flash technology called Papervision3D which has nothing more going for it than a first encounter gimmick factor (I’m not ripping on the papervision technology itself, just when it is used to implement AR). It’s not like I didn’t also fall pray to the sweet song of the papervision sirens myself… during my odyssey towards a new digital reality. But papervision is wicked, tricksy, false. Because of it I feel like

Disabling your Twitter background image cleanly

Something that’s frustrating me with the Twitter API is that there seems to be a useful piece of information missing when querying the API for a users settings. There’s a few different ways of pulling this info but http://twitter.com/users/show/ldnstreetlife.xml is as good as any for the purpose of showing you what I’m talking about. The feed contains all the users profile information so we can quite nicely replicate their design in our own app except one vital piece – there is no mention of whether or not the background-image has been disabled.

Whitelisted by the Twitter API

This was a very exciting discovery I made yesterday. I was on the Twitter API FAQ looking for exact numbers for the query rate limit when I noticed the following entry:
I keep hitting the rate limit. How do I get more requests per hour?
Just fill out this other handy form! Note that you must have a Twitter account and must be signed in as the account you want the rate limits raised for. Please also note that we only… approve developers for the whitelist.
It may take up to 72 hours for us to get back

Introducing www.BadTwitterFriends.com

So I posted yesterday how to use the Twitter API but failed to mention my exact reason behind why I started messing with it in the first place. Quite simply it was because a friend I was following on Twitter wasn’t following me back. And I wondered who else wasn’t following me, the Twitter website was no real help as it only offers separate views of your friends and followers without any way to cross reference them. And after a little digging around I couldn’t find anything that did this, there was nothing in the Twitter clients I use, and…

Mashing up the Twitter API with PHP

<?php
$username = "youraccountname";
$password = "yourpassword";
$url="http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/londonstreetlif.xml";
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$result = curl_exec ($curl); //remove space before parenthesis
curl_close($curl);
?>

Enhancing Twitter via TweetDeck, aka Twitter day three

Okay so it’s day three of Twitter for me and I started to feel like I was pretty much tweeting to myself and didn’t have many people I was following, I was far from understanding the power of Twitter and what makes it so addictive. Getting ‘friends’ on Twitter didn’t seem all that easy, I find that the search facility provided is far from useful, unlike say the Facebook one which I find quite thorough.