Twitter versus Facebook Status Message

This is important to explore, people need to understand this difference.  Facebook is a social network whereas Twitter is a micro-blog.  In a social network you interact with your pre-selected friends, in a blog you expose yourself to the entire world.  I can’t explain it any more simpler than that.  He ended up understanding Facebook as having your friends over for dinner whereas Twitter is like hanging out at a rave.  I’d say that was pretty accurate regarding the dinner – it’s a closed occasion by invite only (and family members you don’t even like might come by and join in and there’s little you can do about it!), and spot on for the rave analogy and you can see a sideshow below to mirror this.

Still don’t understand why Twitter is different than Facebook Status

But he still didn’t get it.  The thing is I happened to know from being friends with him on Facebook that he barely ever updates his status.  And he doesn’t blog either.  So if you don’t have a desire to talk to the masses then how can you get it?  But look, Twitter isn’t just about micro-blogging, it’s also about micro-following…

Follow me, me no follow you

This I love about Twitter.  See in Facebook if someone wants to be friends with you then you have to be friends back in order to be connected.  And what ends up happening?  Noise noise noise.  You end up being friends with a shitload of people you don’t care to know about and they drown out everything that the people you are interested with hearing from are doing.  But with Twitter someone can follow you and you don’t have to follow them back.  This is super powerful.

Real-time Search

Even people that use Twitter don’t understand how powerful it is (so how can those who don’t stand a chance?).  Twitter is pure information.  Wow I love that so much I’ll say it again.  Twitter is pure information.  It’s what’s happening right now, and it’s searchable instantly in real-time.  Forget TV news, news websites, newspapers, everything that happens these days is reported first on Twitter, instantly and unbiased (there’s very little room for bias in 140 characters, and there’s enough ‘reporters’ to allow to read between the lines of any bias that does come through), when the attacks in Mumbai happened we knew about it first via Twitter, we heard first on Twitter about the intimidation going on during the Afghanistan elections, and when Michael Jackson died no matter where you were or what you were doing, if you had a mobile device and you were on Twitter you knew about it that instant.  I even remember during the big webcast for the iPhone OS 3.0 update we all went for lunch and used Twitter for news on the new features.

Hash Tag #help

This is pretty amazing. Twitter has many hidden gems most of which I won’t go into in this article, but something worth a mention is hash tags, and more specifically using them to help you solve a problem. If you are new to the iPhone and are wondering how to save a missed call to your contact list then tweet, or you want to know how to make rounded corners using CCS3. In both cases you would tweet your question with the #help tag, and add #iphone or #css respectively. The web is full of knowledgeable people that like nothing more than to let the world know this by answering your questions.

140 character limit is power

I hear this a lot from non Twitter users and those new to Twitter, wondering when the 140 character limit will be lifted, that’s when they’ll get into Twitter. I know where they’re coming from, I thought the same during my early days of Twitter, it’s seen as a hindrance by outsiders. But those who adopt also adapt and begin to realize how powerful it is. I already said how Twitter is pure information and that’s largely due to this fact, there’s no room to give your opinion when you’re reporting a fact, not space for chitchat when you’re relaying a message, and no squeezing gray between the black and white. When you get used to it you begin to realize how powerful the 140 character limit is, you appreciate how much you can say in 140 characters, and in return how much information you can learn from a handful of tweets.

Conclusion

Twitter is immensely powerful and equally as useful. Most of Twitters power actually lies in its API and the third party apps and services that are built around it, this is something I haven’t really touched on in this article as I looked just to explore the similarities it has with the Facebook status. It isn’t better or worse than Facebook, it’s a very different product built to accomplish a different goal, to fill a very different void. In fact a quote I’ve read before, and I apologize I don’t know who first said it so I choose to credit it to no one, sums it up nicely:

Facebook is for people I went to school with, LinkedIn is for people I’ve worked with, and Twitter is for people I want to know

The point is there’s a place and a need for both Twitter and Facebook.

And finally, below is a very nice deck put together by Iain Taite from Poke which sums up the Twitter party theory:

• Links -Any links that exist to your Twitter page will no longer have any relationship to you – comments you have made in posts, retweets others have made of your tweets, search results linking to your twitter page – these will all be dead, there is no grace period, your old profile is instantly killed.
• TwitPic – I imagine this applies to all the Twitter photo services out there but in my case I was using TwitPic.  The service depends on your Twitter username and as you are no longer that user then you have no control over that account.  And the new TwitPic account you will create will have no images in it (or in my case it had some – see below).
• Resurrection – You might find, as I did, that your new name is an old one that someone gave up. Just as the account you give up might one day be picked up by someone else, your new account might be someones old account.  Therefore you must understand that there might already be a relationship out there with your account – there may already be links to your new account, you may have photos that aren’t yours in TwitPic or another Twitter related service.
• Statistics -There are a lot of statistically driven third party apps out there and you may be using some of them.  And just like TwitPic it is highly likely they are tied to your account via your username, so when the switch is made the statistics will be lost.  And also,if you are resurrecting an old account you may find that these third party apps will be holding information for your new account that date back to the previous owner.

Like I say it’s probably not that big of a deal. If someone gave up the Twitter username that you are inheriting then it probably didn’t have much usage anyways – there’s probably not a whole lot linking to it, the TwitPic and other 3rd party accounts are probably barely if at all used.  But you might want to do the following:

Research

But don’t take switching Twitter username lightly.  It may be a move that you think is important enough to do but you only want to have to do it once, so take a moment to research the new name you are picking.  Do a search on it to make sure it’s not associated with anything bad (make sure it’s available first!).  Like maybe the user changed their name or closed their account because they’d got into some silly negative situations out there on the big bad web.  So take a moment to do some searches on the account in Google to see what pre established relationships it already has so you can decide if you want to inherit them or not.

Save, Purge, and Update

Before you make the switch and give up your old Twitter username, which essentially means you are giving up access to your own third party accounts, take the time to save any old data you want to keep – for example make sure you save your Twitpic photos locally, they may be your only copies.  And you will probably want to delete everything from these accounts – you will no longer have a relationship with these accounts so you wont want personal photos or information attached to them.  And when you have made the switch, if your new name is resurrected from an old user, make sure you go into TwitPic and such accounts and purge any old photos or data the previous user may have left behind.  And unless you want to start from scratch you could upload your old photos and data to your new third party accounts.

Secondary Account

I didn’t do this, my Twitter presence wasn’t huge and I was being followed mainly by friends (and I just didn’t think of it at the time!) but if you have a big following you may want to take this step.  As explained on this link after you change your name open a second account with your old name and place a simple tweet explaining that you have switched to a new name.  This will help with the issue of links to your old account, allowing the users who followed those links to find your new one.

Profile Picture

You might find you want to change your profile picture when you change your Twitter name, in my case it was part of a rebrand so I definitely did, but it’s worth hanging onto your old picture for a week or two to give your followers the chance to associate your old picture with your new name before you do.

First Tweet

And finally, you may find it useful to send out a first tweet under your new account name to let your followers know about the change.

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, where as with other apps it can be apparent the developers haven’t quite been able to step away from traditional mobile app development and harness the power of the iPhone.  But it’s not just an iPhone app, it’s actually a Twitter client, and in that I believe it severely fails.

Yes it has some sweet features – manage multiple accounts (I think it’s the only free iPhone Twitter client to offer this), create multiple views (this is very cool), group those you follow together, and synching with the desktop client.  But I think it runs before it can walk, those features are way cool but it lacks the basics of what I need from a Twitter client.  It doesn’t scroll down to your oldest new tweet, what’s the deal there?  And the color difference between the new and old tweet state is barely visible to the naked eye.  A designer friend who has the app didn’t even realize there are different color states, and this is a guy that can spot an off pixel on a screen from across the room and one floor up.  The two colors are so the same it reminds me of that scene in American Psycho when they are all sitting around comparing how different their business cards are when they all appear to be the same off-white color.  So I have to actually remember the last tweet I read?  And even if I do remember I have to manually scroll down the 146 new tweets I’ve just recieved.  And all this applies again and again for the multiple columns.

And another area where the app fails is its direct message interface.  As far as I can tell it doesn’t even show your sent messages.  What’s the thinking behind that?  It should take lead from Twitterfon who does it perfectly and displays both sides of the conversation in speech bubbles with avatars just like an IM app.

I dunno why I’m choosing to be so negative about a free app, I guess that whole “obviously” thing really wound me up.  The desktop version is definitely badass, and they’ve put a lot of work into their iPhone app so why have such serious usability issues?  Maybe I don’t need a tool as powerful as TweetDeck on-the-go so I don’t appreciate it, I don’t have multiple twitter accounts and I don’t follow hundreds of tweeple so I can live without the grouping functionality away from my desk.  Personally I just use Twitterfon, it might not be as beautiful but I think it’s badass, obviously.

Here’s what I’m talking about. The following video has been going around recently and is quite interesting:

It’s mixing AR with Twitter. It’s a sweet concept and as Twitter already geotags your tweets you’d think those tweets would appear digitally in the same spot where they were published. But it doesn’t necessarily seem to working that way, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s really going on, but it appears that ghosts are tweeting from halfway up trees? Not to worry though it’s the thought that counts, just think about sitting in a bar and looking across the room and seeing the crowds tweets in speech bubbles above their heads. Neat huh?

I came across this guy earlier this week and he’s been giving me inspiration:

It’s Mr super sneaky invisible stealth dude. And I really like the fact that his art is analogue and yet it’s helped me to trigger a digital concept. It’s basically to combine the above AR Twitter app with TwitPic. So you’re walking through London and you see before you a huge collage of photos perfectly placed in their exact locations, sometimes even overlapping, the compass and gyroscope in our mobile devices enables the photo to appear in its exact location, angle, and dimensions. And with a city that big it probably wouldn’t be long until everything you see before you has completely become the alternative reality created by the Twittersphere, maybe transparently overlaying the actual reality. Yeah it’s kind of a cool idea but it’s a bit messy. But what happens if we throw in an extra dimension, that of time, the time of day to be exact? Now the photo will only appear at the exact time of the day it was taken, hang around for a few moments, then disappear. Imagine it, you stand there and watch a busy London street, Leicester Square even, and as you do photos fade in for a moment then vanish, hundreds of photos come and go every second, the ghosts of days and years long past are alive again for a brief moment every new day, forever changing our perception of reality and the very idea of space and time. Trippy.

Actually thinking about it this is probably something else I came across recently that greatly contributed to the inspiration for this idea.

So c’mon folks help me out, we gotta come up with a new name for this technology as the current term has already been killed by inferior technologies falsely claiming to be it. Maybe like ‘Super Vision’ or something, anything that’s different. Let’s just come up with a new name already so we can talk about it without throwing up in our mouths a little, so we can be really excited about this technology again.

It’s a simple oversight by the API team and one that I’m sure is a dead simple fix when they get around to addressing it. I tried hitting up a couple of the Twitter API coders directly on Twitter with no luck, so I just recently submitted it as a bug http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=370.

In the mean time I wanted to come up with a way to address this issue in my app. More than anything I myself have the background-image disabled in my settings so when I look up myself in my own app it’s ugly. The obvious simple solution was to throw in an exception for myself, but that doesn’t really fly with me.

The second idea I had was something way more complicated. Firstly I’d need to copy over the twelve theme settings into my app. Then I’d be able to cross-reference the users background image with their background color to see if they were using a default image with a custom color. If that were the case it would mean the user had personalized their background color but not their background image, and therefore it was highly likely that the background image had been disabled. At first this seemed like quite a clever idea, it certainly worked in my case where I had disabled my background image and personalized my background color but my background image still remained as one of the default themes. But what if a user had at one point uploaded their own image and then decided to disable it? In that scenario their disabled background image would still be displayed. And then there’s the perhaps more unlikely, but still possible situation where a user has kept the default background image enabled but changed the background color. In that scenario the background image would wrongly not display in my app.

Third time lucky was the obvious, and the one that I settled on as a viable solution while we wait on the API team to amend the feed. It’s basically just to upload an invisible image as your background image in the Twitter display setting – an invisible image being either a transparent gif/png or an image matching your background color (which would obviously be harder to maintain in the long run). I created a 1px x 1px transparent gif and it worked great:

It’s not an across the board solution, it only works if each individual user takes a moment to update the background image in their settings. But for the time being it works great for me, it no longer looks like my page is broke in my own app, and I’m sure the Twitter API team will have this issue resolved in no time. If you also have your background image disabled in your Twitter profile go ahead and re-use my image so you don’t run into the same problem: http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_background_images/6355571/transparent.gif

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 to you, but we try to respond to requests as fast as possible barring holidays and disasters. Once you’re on the whitelist you’ll be able to make up to 20,000 requests per hour. Use them wisely!

That’s weird, I’d spent the whole weekend reading the API and I’d never noticed that. Is it possible they’ve just opened it up to the public? Whereas before we had to jump through a couple more hoops to get whitelisted? Seems likely as they slipped in opening up OAuth beta to the public on Monday without really making a big fuss about it.

Anyways within the hour I received an email from Twitter approving my request, and it was only a few hours later that my username was whitelisted, and now a day later I can see my IP addresses are too. And now I can make 20,000 API calls an hour! Or more even, I’m not sure, as the email response I got actually states “You should find any rate limits no longer apply to authenticated requests”.

And all just in time too. @keithelder (who I wrongly never gave credit for coming up with the domain name – sorry Keith I didn’t think you wanted your good name attached to a bad joke!) tweeted about www.BadTwitterFriends.com and sent a fair number of users its way, which would’ve used up the default 100 queries an hour within minutes and made for a really lame experience. @olivers even blogged about it, thanks dude I’m glad some people know how to take a joke (some people have reacted to the site by questioning its Twitter ethics LOL!). So now the flood gates are open maybe I can really do some damage with this thing, take it from being a bad joke to something that is genuinely useful. Or not.

Luckily the Twitter API is very easy to use and it didn’t take me long to have lists of both my friends and my followers, and once you have that the PHP array_diff() function takes care of the rest. In the space of a only few hours I had the whole thing up on my dev box and had hit up those wrongdoers who chose not to follow me demanding an explanation! People responded very well and explained that they’d run into this before and it was tough to keep track of your friends and followers on Twitter. Though it started as a joke it seemed I had ended up creating a way to visually display some Twitter information that until now had not been easily available.

In fact some of the feedback was so positive it was suggested that I make this available publicly, so I grabbed a domain name and setup a site for all to use. I cleaned up my code and made it production ready, and then proceeded to spend way more time than I had spent coding the whole thing to come up with a half decent design. I am no designer but luckily each users Twitter preferences are exposed by the API so I was able to use their background image and colors (this is a real bonus as it makes each results page visually unique).

As I talked about yesterday the API doesn’t allow for more than 100 queries an hour so I’ve had to add in some limitations, you can read more in the about section. But for the average Twitter user, as oppose to some celebrity super user with tens of thousands of followers, I think this is a simple enough tool that serves it’s specific purpose well. I guess just how useful it really is remains to be seen.

Anyways, without further ado I present to you www.BadTwitterFriends.com!

Oh and by the way, yes I am now being followed by the original offender!

Now lets use SimpleXML to loop through the returned xml and create an array of my friends:

<?php
$friendsArr=array();
$feed = simplexml_load_string($result);
foreach($feed->user AS $userXML){
   $user = simplexml_import_dom($userXML);
   $friendsArr[]=(string)$user->screen_name;
}
?>

Lets assume we have done the same thing to create an array of my followers, now we can find everyone that I am friends with but doesn’t follow me:

<?php
$badfriendsArr=array_diff($friendsArr,$followersArr);
?>

And finally lets display, the lists are returned from Twitter in the order the relationship began from newest to oldest, so lets order alphabetically and print:

<?php
natcasesort($badfriendsArr);
foreach($badfriendsArr AS $badfriend){
   echo "<a href="http://www.twitter.com/$badfriend">$badfriend</a><br>";
}
?>

all @ replies
The first thing he explained to me is how to change my reply settings, which I didn’t even know you could. When logged into the Twitter website go to Settings->Notices and the second option down @replies allows you to change this setting, by default it’s set to only show replies from the people you’re following. The good thing with the ‘all @ replies’ setting is it allows you to see all replies posted by people you follow, whether or not you follow the person to whom the reply is directed, read more here. Basically by enabling this setting you’re better setup to find new people to follow, and maybe even come across some that you already know.

Twitter Clients
The next thing he told me was not to use the Twitter website and to get a client. I’d been using TwitterFon on the iPhone but I hadn’t really thought about this approach for my desktop. He pointed me to a Windows client he made called Witty Twitter (needs WPF so you’re good with .Net 3.5) which I installed and it looked pretty good. But no sooner had I installed it than I noticed that it actually tells you in a tweet what client was used to post it, and most people (including Keith who wrote the Witty Twitter app!) were using something called TweetDeck.

TweetDeck
And within a few minutes of installing TweetDeck a whole new world of understanding was opened up to me, it instantly made Twitter 100 times better, I finally grasped the potential that Twitter has. It’s honestly a completely different experience, in fact to the point where I wonder if they shouldn’t push a Twitter client as the primary tool when signing up, at least somehow make it obvious, or better yet make the website interface as useful. The first thing you notice is that its laid out into 3 different columns – ‘All Friends’, ‘Replies’, and ‘Direct Messages’, and that layout alone instantly helps you to understand how Twitter really works. Another obvious improvement over the web interface is the built in URL shrinking functionality, there’s various services to chose from, the most familiar being tinyurl, and you realize a tweet no longer needs to be a messy experience involving multiple tasks and windows. I won’t get into it much more, this isn’t intended as a review so much as a pointer in the right direction for Twitter novices such as myself.

Today Twitter is a lot less shit!

So before I wrote this I wanted to see if anyone else out there thought the same, and low and behold the first result Google spits out for “twitter is shit” is this http://www.bannerblog.com.au/news/2009/01/twitter_is_shit_at.php, and it was only written last month. And reading it I think Ashley is pointing out everything that I found wrong with Twitter when I first looked into it way back when. In fact the first thing I noticed when I joined is that it wouldn’t even let me create my full username. For better of for worse since many years ago I am londonstreetlife online, for all my profiles that’s me. But Twitter only allows for 15 characters and sadly I’m 16, so now I’ve become @londonstreetlif in the twittersphere :( And I get why, a point that the article makes, you can only Twitter a max of 140 characters, so a tweet would be taken up with @everyones_name and not much space left for anything else. Just to be clear I get that Ashley doesn’t actually think Twitter is shit, in fact she admits she’s quite addicted to it, just that she recognizes some major flaws.

I guess my main rant with Twitter is that people are using it to shamelessly brand themselves, b-list and has-been (or never-will-be) celebrities cling to it for dear fame. And corporations are using it as some sort of Q&A medium and as proof that they are transparent, there are much better platforms out there to achieve this, and as far as transparency goes, I sit behind the curtain and I know that there is a wall of lawyers and the whole transparency thing is pretty much an illusion.

So I have taken the plunge and joined because an upcoming project requires me to know the basics of Twitter, which I shamefully didn’t, or at least I thought I didn’t but after having now joined I might take that back, it is very very basic after all.

Right now I guess I can’t really judge Twitter too much because I’m so new to it. I’ve known about it for as long as it’s been about but until now I’ve not immersed myself into it so I don’t know what it’s like to follow and be followed, or to tweet my every thought and whim to my hearts content. And I get that I probably will get into it, and become addicted to it, just like many of my friends who are highly intelligent yet swear by it. But I just think at the same time I will always think it’s a bit shit.