Twitter | Technology Blog

Url Revealer

December 24th, 2008

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Url shortening services like Tinyurl have seen an influx since the release of web services like Twitter. Twitter is a prime example as the services limits the amount of characters per message to 160 much like SMS on cell phones. Yes, you can write / send multiple messages but that’s not really the same, is it?

If you head over to Twitter and log into your account you most likely will see links of shortening services. While they make links shorter so that you can save chars they also hide the real address of the link which in its extreme could be used to lure users to a website they do not want to visit. This can have serious consequences depending on the location or place the links are accessed: Think of following a link leading to an adult site at work.

Long URL Please is a experimental Firefox extension that turns urls of shortening services to their original one. It currently supports about 30 different services with more being added regularly.

ping.fm: Update all your social networks at once

November 28th, 2008

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Sites like Twitter have scores of competitors and it is possible that for someone to effectively socially network, they will have to use sites other than their preferred one. It is obviously quite a chore to have to update Twitter, Facebook, Pownce etc separately.

Commenter reactive pointed out ping.fm, a website which in fact I use. ping.fm allows you to update one site, through a variety of means, which will then pass those updates on to 32 other websites.

ping.fm amazingly allows updates to be textual or graphical (you can set ping.fm to upload images to Flickr etc.). The ability to send videos is going to be launched soon.

Social Network Status Generator

November 17th, 2008

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Have we come this far already? Desperate times require desperate measures it seems. To impress, one has to be witty. This is especially hard on social networks with millions of other users who want to impress as well.

According to the developers of Generatus their product is ideal for the imaginatively challenged. Generatus is a social network status generator which turns the overly repeated and boring statuses like “Martin is working”, “Drinking Coffee” or “Jim is visiting his grandparents” into something witty and original.

Simplicity was probably the main design idea behind Generatus. Males can simply hit the Generate button while females will have to click on the female to generate female statuses (not sure if there is truly that much difference to justify that, it is probably used to make use of the right grammatical person in the sentences). It is also possible to use tags to get a status that relates to the selected tags.

Publish RSS News Feeds On Twitter

October 26th, 2008

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Joe Anderson who recently began writing articles for Ghacks send me a message two days ago asking what I thought about Twitterfeed and I had to admit that I never heard of that service before. He let me know that webmasters could use Twitterfeed to publish RSS News Feeds on Twitter. What it does is that it checks the provided RSS News Feeds regularly and posts new items to a Twitter account. That’s the basic principle at least.

Users need an Open ID to log into the service and a Twitter account to publish the RSS News Feed to. It basically works like this. The user creates a new account at Twitterfeed using an Open ID account. He can then create a new Twitter Feed to the account by supplying a Twitter account and a feed url of the feed that he wants to add. Once that has been setup Twitterfeed will publish new items on the Twitter account automatically until the user pauses or deletes it again.

The feed is not authorized which means that anyone can post any feed to Twitter which could be interesting for some users who would like to post a number of feeds to a Twitter account. A number of feeds? The number of feeds that can be published does not seem to be limited which in effect means that someone could create a new Twitter account and publish all of his favorite RSS News Feeds to it.

Twitter Monitor Monitter

August 14th, 2008

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Am I the only one who is getting enough of those third party Twitter Api services that all use (i)tter in their domain name? Despite it’s pretty silly name Monitter, which apparently stands for Monitor Twitter, offers an interesting service.

Users can enter up to three terms in the three columned main interface which from then on will be monitored by the service. When a user on Twitter uses the phrase it will be shown in one of the columns as well. The updates pretty much appear in real time on the website.

The most interesting aspect of Monitter is however the area filter. You can specify to only receive updates if the sender is located a maximum x kilometers from your location. That’s great if you want to catch up on local news, say New York only.

Kwippy Invites

August 3rd, 2008

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While I do have Twitter, Facebook and several other accounts I barely use them and cannot see a real gain for using them extensively. Quite the opposite. Still, I was invited by Joe from Webby’s World to Kwippy which from first looks seems to be some sort of Twitter clone. It is currently in private beta and I would like to give everyone the opportunity to join the beta.

What you need to do is to follow me on Twitter so that I can invite you to Kwippy. Yes, that sounds pretty strange but from what I can tell the only real option to invite other users is to invite the Twitter followers. I’m also not sure if I can repeat that indefinitely or not.

So if you want an invite you need to follow me on Twitter. Use the following link to my profile. I’m not truly sure about the differences between Twitter and Kwippy, if anyone is using both services feel free to post a comment to explain things.