Tag: Twitter

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The classic link-sharing site Delicious is still around, trying to find a niche in the new social media world. One of the things they’ve recently done is set up a way to import all links you post on Twitter. It does a historical import when you link the account, and then pulls in new tweets going forward.

It’s a cool idea, depending on how you use the sites, and they’ve made it just flexible enough that anyone who might want to do this in the first place will find a way to match their use case.

In my case, I mainly used Delicious as an additional bookmark store that I could access across browsers and accounts, though for the most part that’s been replaced by Xmarks. I haven’t used it as much for deliberate sharing, though I’ve posted the occasional link in the hopes that someone might notice it.

Anyway, I linked it up with my personal Twitter account, left the site for a few hours, then came back to see just how far back it had imported. It went back about 3 years, pulling in over 1,000 links that I’d posted to Twitter.

The Good:

  • It merges duplicates.
  • Links are backdated to the day you posted the tweet.
  • All imported links are tagged with “from twitter” (you can change this), making it easy to filter.
  • Hashtags are imported as tags.
  • The text of your tweet becomes the comment.
  • It extracts titles and thumbnail images from the links.
  • It can follow some redirectors, including Twitter’s own t.co.

The Bad:

  • It doesn’t follow all redirectors. There are an awful lot of bit.ly and is.gd links in there.
  • That also means that if I tweeted the same link twice using different link shorteners, it doesn’t resolve the duplicates.
  • A lot of those links were only of short term interest.
  • Three years is plenty of time for a redirector (or, of course, a target link) to shut down. Fortunately, it looks like I didn’t use tr.im much.
  • My blog automatically tweets links to new posts, which means every post I’ve made in the last three years is in there – the earliest with an is.gd or tinyurl link, the later ones with bit.ly. I don’t need those in my own bookmarks (with a few exceptions), and as far as sharing goes, it makes me feel spammy to plug three years’ worth of backlist at once.
  • Searching for links gives you less-functional results than simply looking at your list or filtering by tag. Not all details appear on the results page, bulk actions aren’t available, and you can’t always delete a link if you edit it from search results. This meant I couldn’t, for instance, search for “New post” or “K-Squared Ramblings,” skim the titles and bulk-delete the bookmarks to my own content.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking a few minutes here and there to go through what started as 60 pages’ worth of imported links, delete the ones I don’t want to keep and fix up the ones I do. It started out faster than my last Twitter-related cleanup project, but that’s because there were a lot of auto-posted links I could just delete without taking the time to evaluate or label them. It’s already slowing down.

I could just leave all the clutter there, but part of the point is for this to be my bookmarks-away-from-home, and it’s easier to find stuff without the extra junk.

On the plus side, between this and the broken link cleanup, I’m getting to see a bunch of old posts and photos I’d forgotten about. That’s been an interesting process.

It’s also convinced me that linkblogging round-ups really don’t belong on this blog. I still do them on Speed Force, but that’s in part because Speed Force has readers who don’t follow the social networks. (OK, let’s be honest: because Speed Force has readers.) Here, where it’s just a personal site, I’m better off sticking with the best medium for each post. That means Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for short posts (barring a few categories that I’ve got history here, like license plate spotting), the blog for longer posts, and social networks for link sharing.

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Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

  • Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
  • The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
  • YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
  • OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

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So, Twitter blocked access from Twidroyd and UberTwitter today, citing acceptable use policy violations, then classily pushing their own apps. IMO this would be similar to Google blocking Internet Explorer or Firefox from accessing their services, then telling people “oh, you can use Chrome.”

UberMedia has made some changes to appease the Twitter TOS guardians, and expects to be un-blocked soon.

Anyway, onto the accusations:

These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

This is the most I’ve been able to find. Let’s break it down:

a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters

“Privacy issue” is a pretty strong accusation (not that it seems to have actually hurt Facebook).

Here’s a thought: Twidroyd has built-in support for TwitLonger, which will let you route a longer message through a third-party service and then post it as a shorter tweet with a link to the full message.

My guess: this was enabled for all outgoing messages instead of just public tweets, including direct messages. This would make the message (a) visible to Twitlonger itself, and (b) potentially visible to anyone who obtained the URL to that message.

trademark infringement

According to UberMedia, they’ve been working on a name change for UberTwitter for the past three weeks. If that’s the case, it sounds like Twitter is just padding the accusations.

changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money

This is a serious accusation, if true. The whole purpose of a communication platform is for one person to convey a message to another person. If that message is altered in transit, it undermines the whole purpose.

But here’s the question: What do they mean by content? Do they mean the exact characters typed in? Do they mean the words? If Twidroyd shortens a URL so that it fits in 140 characters, does that count as changing the content? How about that twitlonger support?

If Twidroyd or UberTwitter prefers a particular URL shortener in exchange for money (just as desktop web browsers prefer a particular search engine), does that count as “changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money?”

Isn’t that essentially what Twitter plans to do by forcing all URLs (even those already shortened) through its t.co URL shortener in order to collect data which it can then…*gasp*…monetize?

Edit: And just as I finish the post, I find a post explaining exactly what the issues were. I was right about the privacy issue, though it was with tmi.me, not twitlonger.

As for changing content, the claim was that UberCurrent (the third app whose name I kept forgetting) was changing affiliate links to point to their own affiliate links instead of the author’s. UberMedia says that they “don’t currently do this,” implying that they may have at some time in the past, or may have been considering it. In any case, that’s a jerky thing to do, if not quite as severe as altering the meaning of a message. I remember a Firefox extension that would let you raise funds for an organization by changing Amazon links to use their affiliate links (eventually discontinued due to Amazon TOS violation), but I think even that made a point of not altering existing affiliate links.

Anyway, It’s a good thing they’re using the Android and Blackberry markets. I expect I’ll see an updated Twidroyd later today (or whenever it is that the phone checks for new apps). From what I’ve heard about the iPhone iOs App Store, it could take as much as a week to get the fixed version approved and out in the hands of its users.

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Lately I’ve been linkblogging via Twitter, and using Alex King’s Twitter Tools to build a weekly digest in WordPress. The problem is that since I’m pulling the posts from Twitter, I’m stuck with Twitter’s limitations: Short descriptions, cryptic URLs, and unreadable links.

So I wrote a plugin to process the links. When Twitter Tools builds a digest, the plugin calls out to the remote site, follows redirects, retrieves the final URL and (if possible) extracts the page title. Then it replaces the cryptic-looking link with a human-readable link, transforming this:

Check out this site: http://bit.ly/9MhKVv

into this:

Check out this site: Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning

If it can’t retrieve a title, it uses the final hostname. If it can’t connect at all, it leaves the link unchanged.

The download is here, and that’s where I’ll put future versions:
» Plugin: Twitter Tools – Nice Links.

Future

One thing I’d like to add at some point is cleaning up the title a bit. They can get really long, even without people trying to stuff keywords and descriptions in for SEO purposes. All it takes is a page title plus a site title, like this one. That’s a much more complicated problem, though, since there isn’t any sort of standard for which part of a title is the most important. I suppose I could just clip it to the first few words.

I’d also like to clean up duplicate text. Often the link title and tweet content are going to be the same, or at least overlap, especially if it’s generated by a sharing button or extension. That should be easier to check.

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Weblog Tools Collection recently spotlighted a WordPress plugin to automatically tweet old posts. It seems like a good way to bring attention to a site’s archives, as long as it’s used sparingly. The frequency can be as high as once an hour, which IMO is a good way to lose all your followers, but one post every few days seems like it might be reasonable and even interesting.

I’ve already got a setup in place to show a “flashback” post on the front page, but most of the blog’s traffic seems to come from searches these days. Every once in a while I’ll happen to look at the front myself and say, “Oh, yeah, that was a good one!” and post a link on Twitter or Facebook.

This new plugin posts automatically, and picks an article at random. That’s helpful, because it can find old posts that I’ve forgotten. On the downside, because it’s random, there’s no quality control. It could just as easily pull out something completely inane that was funny for about a week five years ago as it could dredge up a forgotten gem. And there’s always the risk of promoting “Happy New Year!” in August — which is exactly what happened when I tested it on Speed Force.

You can filter out categories, but I think it might be more useful to filter on tags. Sure, it can take a while to go through the archives tagging posts that you feel are worth a second look, but it would certainly improve the signal/noise ratio with this scheme. Even better, there’s a lot more you can do once you’ve tagged your “classics.” Highlight them on archive pages, list some of them in the sidebar, build an index, etc.

Hmm, this might be an interesting project at some point.

Update (August 23): Well, I’ve disabled this for now — on both blogs — because of the lack of control. I’d rather forget to post “Hey, remember this?” than have it clutter up people’s accounts with old linkblogging digests or something similarly pointless. When I have time, I should work on that classics project, both tagging posts and hacking on the plugin.