Alex Bosworth's Weblog

(twitter) ReTweet dilemna

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:25:39 +0800

I’m fully in the Twitter cult now, even though I may have been dragged in kicking and screaming, I like tumblr but the conversation ability of Twitter really takes things to a level above blogging…

I’m still working on http://tweetbe.at/ , which has solved a lot of the ‘noise’ problem that I had on twitter - but it’s been challenging work given the limitations of twitter’s API and the problems inherent in writing a web application in pure javascript without any server code.

Now twitter is throwing a curveball at me where they want to own the ‘retweet’ and make it an official part of twitter.

To me this is pretty significant because it’s the first feature where twitter is introducing something that is impossible to do with an SMS. I don’t really count replies because you can still reply over SMS, it just wont’ provide a link back - but retweeting won’t be something you can do on your standard cell phone.

My issue with this feature though is more in that they are messing up the way I use Twitter. When I retweet I add info! If I retweet someone I add something like ‘cool’ or ‘this sucks’. I sometimes credit multiple people, or a chain of people. I sometimes alter the message to make it more readable or relevant.

In the future, this will not be possible, retweets will only be an identical copy of the original message and un-alterable. They won’t credit who you heard it from, they will credit who originally said it.

Of course I can just keep doing things the same old way: just post a copy of someone’s message and add “RT” to it. All I will lose is the metadata with the id of the original message.

My dilemna is that it confuses my twitter tool: do I keep the RT functionality that copies a message for you, or do I add a new RT functionality that doesn’t copy anything and just adds a pointer to your stream?

The answer might be to let you choose to edit a retweet which then disables the ‘official’ support, but it sounds a little clunky to me.

Working on a totally new look and feel for http://tweetbe.at/

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:06:24 +0800

Working on a totally new look and feel for http://tweetbe.at/

11 days and 50 versions later tweetbe.at is coming along great,...

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:21:34 +0800

11 days and 50 versions later tweetbe.at is coming along great, thanks to everyone who has tried it and especially thanks to those who have given me feedback - @cleverclogs and @spinchange for the most part.

You can see from the screenshot I’ve added new styles support, also noise fighting tools including a ‘mute words/phrases list’ and ‘1 click block’.

Tweetbe.at started as a way to emulate IRC channels over Twitter, but now my goal has shifted somewhat, now I want to make Twitter into a full fledged instant chat client, both 1 on 1 and many to many. That includes everything from join/part and presence notifications to emoticons and theming.

The major barriers are basically Twitter’s strict limitations, and some data structures missing from Twitter’s web implementation. I’m hoping that other Twitter developers will start coming up with a portable (and extensible) ‘groups’ format, since they all seem to be independently developing the same feature more or less.

Irish pub, beijing china, us independence day bbq

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:13:38 +0800

Irish pub, beijing china, us independence day bbq

Tweetbe.at live twitter chat

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:56:59 +0800

I’ve been working on a side project for Twitter, which I discussed in a previous post - what it is is a live chatstream for twitter, which builds on the #hashtag idea

With tweetbe.at you can see who else is watching a #hashtag and chat with them. You can also fold in other searches or hashtags, or posts from other users into the stream:

The idea is based on the similarities between IRC and twitter, this tries to bridge the gap and add some of the benefits of IRC to twitter. In IRC you can start chatting without having to build a network of friends to chat with, and you can chat about some subjects at some times and then leave them alone at other times.

Right now it’s a proof of concept, but everything should be working mostly ok, and it features oauth integration so you can chat directly from tweetbe.at

You can change channels via the location hashtag ie: http://tweetbe.at/#tv - http://tweetbe.at/#javascript - http://tweetbe.at/#socialmedia

Channels can have added users, searches, hashtags, and also block users from appearing.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Seen in a china mall: Dogs and farmers unwelcome

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:06:46 +0800

Seen in a china mall:

Dogs and farmers unwelcome

Tweets are serious business

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:33:44 +0800

I’ve been working on a new tool for Twitter recently which is actually pretty involved, and this has gotten me seriously into twitter, which I had originally struggled to find any point to.

But twitter is serious business as demonstrated by the #iranelection stuff and even here in Beijing by a service from the US Govt that shows the air quality at our embassy. The ‘official’ numbers from the Chinese govt are characterized by particularly optimistic estimates of the air quality here, so it’s very handy to have some numbers from a more impartial observer.

I actually am worried that the feed will be shut down as it’s been growing more and more popular among Chinese visitors, and today it was featured in the China Daily.

As I’ve been getting into twitter, here are the problems with the service I’ve been working through:

Tweets are very boring/mundane -> unlike blogs, which I find interesting based strictly on their content, twitter feeds are interesting based on how interesting I find the person, not what they post. Also, being disciplined about not ‘following-back’ has led to an improvement in my twitter feed.
Following people concentrates too many subjects into a big mess -> I’m not interested in tech stuff or beijing stuff all the time, I want to group the people I follow. The tool I’m working on helps solve this problem by letting me see what different groups of people are talking about.
It’s not easy enough to find people to follow -> follower lists are full of spammers, twitter searches are becoming full of spam too - wefollow is not used very much and ranking people by follower count is semi-useless. The tool I’m working on helps with this too.
Twitter’s web interface is very poor -> following and block and unfollowing is very slow and clumsy on twitter.com, so is following threads of conversation, plus many other simple problems, such as no built in url shortener. It’s very tempting for me to try and solve these issues, but so far I’ve only addressed some and I like everyone else just use twitter’s 3rd party tools to get around its shortcomings

Anyways, I hope to be able to launch my 2nd twitter tool pretty soon, and hopefully twitter corp won’t shut this one down for being too subversive!

Smog in Beijing is serious business

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:06:02 +0800

Smog in Beijing is serious business

Beijing bike w nj plates

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:59:11 +0800

Beijing bike w nj plates

Twitter is now officially blocked in China - I don’t think that you could ever SMS twitter...

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:35:25 +0800

Twitter is now officially blocked in China - I don’t think that you could ever SMS twitter from China, but now the website itself is inaccessible.

Single sign on seems to be everywhere now, with federated logins provided by facebook, google,...

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:19:13 +0800

Single sign on seems to be everywhere now, with federated logins provided by facebook, google, twitter, openid, etc.

In theory this is really good, but I find now on many sites I can’t remember which login I used - did I sign in with facebook or make an account or did I use my google credentials?

JavaScript language advanced tips and tricks

Sun, 10 May 2009 01:31:55 +0800

JavaScript language advanced tips and tricks:

I love Javascript as a language, but a lot of the awesome new language features are missing from webbrowsers, which sucks!

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Fri, 01 May 2009 08:31:46 +0800

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Twitter breaking API rule #1

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:55:33 +0800

Rule #1 when you publish an API - if you change how it works, warn people ahead of time or at the very least: add the change to the changelog or api blog!

Twitter recently silently disabled the ability for API users to find friends on twitter based on friends’ email addresses.

I wasn’t too happy about this because I wrote a tool to find friends on twitter so that I wouldn’t have to give Twitter access to my gmail account. I published that tool earlier, so if you are wondering why it is broken, this is why.

Also bad: the broken call returns success instead of an error response, so even though I wrote error handling code in case of Twitter server errors, my code to handle stuff breaking broke :(

To be fair to Twitter, I realize that their job to keep spam off their system is enormous, and many competing services don’t offer as comprehensive and simple API as they do.

Still, if you already have someone’s email address, it doesn’t seem like too much of a violation to know their twitter account. The real bad guys will probably just adapt by end-running this: adding email contacts to fake gmail accounts and then using the gmail contacts lookup, so in the end only the legitimate developers wind up losing.

Make: Online : Fluid sculpture from plastic tubing Someone...

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:08:21 +0800

Make: Online : Fluid sculpture from plastic tubing

Someone should make a business of selling nifty ‘maker’ type stuff to people who are too lazy to actually be makers.

Trying out JQuery

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:16:58 +0800

I’ve looked at JQuery before, but hadn’t really played around with it until recently.

I’m a prototypejs kind of guy, but jquery is so similar that it’s easy to switch.

There are a lot of small differences, but overall I would say that JQuery feels a lot like Prototype lite. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: JQuery is a lot faster to download than prototype, it’s easier to learn, and a lot of what it’s missing is too high concept or edge-case to be used in most javascript coding tasks anyways.

My major issue with Prototype is that I hate script.aculo.us. Although I haven’t used JQuery UI, it looks less powerful but faster and more consistent across browsers, which are the major issues with script.aculo.us. However you can always implement your own effects and just ignore script.aculo.us.

Overall, I would say that if you are going for a very intensive Javascript project, I would still use Prototype, especially if your project wasn’t effects intensive and you wanted to focus on robustness and maintainability of code, because JQuery offers less sophisticated abstract programming helpers.

If you are working on a project with just a small to medium amount of Javascript, or even small to start and may potentially grow, JQuery is probably the best option and seems to have the traction now. Since Prototype is closely tied to Ruby on Rails and Rails seems to have peaked in 2007 and then spent 2008 going nowhere, I would guess that 2009 will see rails and prototype lose further ground.

Seen in beijing (798)

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:03:04 +0800

Seen in beijing (798)

"Even the iPod shuffle clip gets the rock star treatment. Now forged in stainless steel, the clip..."

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:59:25 +0800

“Even the iPod shuffle clip gets the rock star treatment. Now forged in stainless steel, the clip attaches securely to your shirt, jacket, workout gear, even your backpack. And the sleek, durable, anodized aluminum case — available in silver or black — makes iPod shuffle a wardrobe essential.”

- Apple - iPod shuffle - VoiceOver. Multiple playlists. 4GB.

Apple isn’t afraid to be breathless in their marketing.

Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not? ~~ (A Computer Scientist in a Business School)

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:34:44 +0800

Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not? ~~ (A Computer Scientist in a Business School):

Mechanical Turk only has $600k a month worth of jobs - I don’t understand why it’s not 10 times more.

McDonald's Business Strategy Amid the Recession - WSJ.com

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:54:29 +0800

McDonald's Business Strategy Amid the Recession - WSJ.com:

It’s interesting how some companies prosper during a recession - people cutting back means that companies that help save people money do well.

McDonald’s here in China has stopped offering their neverending stream of new items in favor of slashing already low prices across the board: a standard combo meal is down from around 3 bucks to around 2 bucks.