Last night, well till 2am this morning, I finally fixed a highly annoying problem with VB.

As you know if you’re a regular reader (don’t worry if you just found this via Google looking for the same problem as I had, don’t worry we love you too), I’m currently working on a Twitter client called TwitterBrite, part of the application will make a query to my web server, and pull a list of interesting twitter people worth that user following.

This should be fairly simple, all I need to do is point my WebClient at the correct URL and pull the XML out then process it as I need

But no, my server returns a “(406) Not Acceptable” exception every time. Wikipedia tells us that this error is “The requested resource is only capable of generating content not acceptable according to the Accept headers sent in the request.”

OK… this isn’t pushing any content to the server just pulling from it. So the next step is to see what Dr. Google says. Sadly all my initial search returns is that I’m not alone in having this problem. Then I found one or two gems. So it’s to do with the headers I’m sending to my webserver. But wait MSDN says

Oh… So it can’t be that! And let’s face it “text/xml” isn’t exactly an obscure mime type. So I thought, it must be something server side. So I went into the PHP and forced the header but no joy, so I wrote an e-mail to my web host (at about 1:30am).

Just as I was going to go to bed when I thought “you’ve nothing to lose, just try adding the headers” so I added the three lines

And guess what! It pulled the data first and every time!

So either MSDN is wrong or I missed something! If you have any additional information on this I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several large brands, including the likes of ford and the airline JetBlue has been sold to the email marketing firm ExactTarget.

So I hear you cry, this is just another web2.0 merger who cares?

Well you should, at least you should if you use a web based twitter client for your business.

CoTweet, like Hootsuite, doesn’t use oAuth, at least it doesn’t when I last tried it.

So all CoTweet’s usernames and passwords have just been sold to a third party, so even if you trust coTweet with your username and password do you trust ExactTarget?

It also exposes another issue sourounding cloud based services. That of the cost. CoTweet started life as a free beta, then late last year they started charging $1,500/mo for their basic plan. In any other business this would be called extorsion, you sign-up for a service for free then when your tied to it they rank up the price.

That said CoTweet has a small but active customer base, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to charge such a huge price because if they don’t they go under.

And if your customer service relied on their service and they went out of business what happens to your data? What happens to your customer service?

That’s why TwitterBrite is a desktop based application, if I go under all that happens if you don’t get updates and the “Find interesting people to follow” wouldn’t work, but other than that you wouldn’t notice anything.

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You may want to check out an article I wrote for EzineArticles (yea they must take anything) called "Cloud Computing – Is it Right For Your Business?" In this article I’ll try and give you a balanced view of the pro’s and con’s of cloud computing so that you may make your own mind up as to if it’s for you and your business.

And while I’m plugging stuff, you may want to check out my Amazon books store and my cafepress store. The book store is a collection of the best (well best in my view) books on social networks, business programming etc.

The Cafepress store, hosting the classic “Real Entrepreneurs do it with their bootstraps” design, inspired by the techcrunch Europe clothing range.

OK I planning to sell zero shirts, I may as well use the old cafepress account I have… but I think the books may do well as they are a good selection of books on subject I think you lot will find useful.

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Google Buzz (dubbed by some as the facebook/twitter killer) is Google entrance into the social/real time chat market.

I managed to have a five minute play with it this morning, and it looks and feels a lot more like FriendFeed than twitter or facebook, but that said, what’s the point?

I tend to agree with Microsoft who say.

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

I don’t have the time to check yet another social network. I liked friendfeed (before facebook took it over, when it seemed to die a death) there was little in the way of spam and junk, also I got my twitter and RSS fix that way.

Anyway, I I’m wrong and I do end up using it, you can follow what I’ve got to say from my google profile or via google buzz’s RSS feed.

Am I (and Microsoft) wrong? What do you think?

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A couple of days ago I wrote about how many mobile and desktop application could fail in June. Well twitter have offered a helping hand to many developers. oAuth from a username/password combination.

So how does it work? [The technical bit]

Normally with oAuth the application generators a unique URL from its security tokens, opens a new browser window and asks the user to login, when the user does twitter then redirects back to the site that made the request, and posts a secure token set that, with applications tokens authenticate both the user and the application.

With mobile and desktop applications the process a little different, the application doesn’t have a website to authenticate back to, so it supply the user with a PIN code, that then is user to generate the secure codes within the application.

This doesn’t provide the best in the way of user experience and has been a thorn in the side of many application developers for a long time. Thankfully now you don’t need to, you can just supply the username and password with the oAuth request.

When this request is sent some additional headers are sent

The x_auth_mode, x_auth_username and x_auth_password are new, and if the whole this is sent via SSL, the PIN code is returned to the application directly. No Browser input.

Thanks to @abraham via his blog for the images.

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Facebook’s six years old yesterday, and how do they celebrate? With Jelly and cake? No by annoying me!

No may I add with the re-design. It’s their site they can do with it as they wish, but the fact that this will lead a raft of new invites asking me to join the “we don’t like the new facebook, we want the old one back” well you won’t get it, and even if you can find a million people who agree with you that will still only be 1/400^th of facebooks membership, so they won’t care if you leave.

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Meany of the most popular twitter application, including almost all desktop and mobile applications could stop working in June.

Back in December Ryan Sarver (Twitters Director of Platform ) took the stage at the Le Web conference in France, and announced that come June twitter would stop supporting basic authorization for third party applications (such as Hootsuite or TwetterDeck).

Basic authorization is the method where you submit your username and password directly to the application.

Twitter wants developers to use what is called OAuth to provide authorization. OAuth, is where twitter opens in a new window and asks you to authorize an application, then either returns you to the web site, or provides you with a PIN number if you are authorizing a mobile or desktop application.

However few if any applications have moved to OAuth, HootSuite for example have been “almost ready” for over a year.

However if the rumours floating around Twitters development forum are anything to go by twitter could be planning something that would make makers of mobile and desktop applications react quicker.

According the rumours twitter is planning to kill off the source tag (the part that says send from [MyApp] ) for non-oAuth applications shortly after the Chirp conference in April and then ban all non-oAuth application in June.

This is likely to force developers into action because the Source tag is a great way of promoting your application, to throes who follow, throes who use your application.

Also it would change such applications to say “send via API”, which some other applications take to imply the account is used by spammers.

I feel I must declare an interest here, I’m currently writing a desktop twitter client which uses oAuth to validate users. I believe TwitterBrite not only fills a gap in the market (being the desktop equivalent of Hootsuite) but also since it uses oAuth not Basic authorization, it’s not only more secure but come April, it won’t make you look like a spammer.

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