The Archives
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07.30.08Why It’s Cool Not to be an A-ListerObviously, despite all the talk of long tails, quitting blogging, and all the other issues flying around lately, there are a hell of a lot of perks to being an A-List blogger, or indeed an A-List anything. One huge perk of not being an A-List blogger occurred to me the other day, however - being able to actually use all these cool new services how they were intended. Take services like Twitter or Friendfeed, for example. Scoble and Calacanis et al. have these huge following/follower counts, and while I know there are a certain number of positives to this, these top ...
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05.22.08San Francisco, Happener, STUB, etc.As some of you may know, I am departing to live and work in San Francisco tomorrow, and I really wanted to do a quick post thanking a few of the people involved in getting me there. For a start, I truly want to publicly thank the guys at Happener. Markus and Greg totally blew away any and all preconceptions I had about recruitment by being personal, fun, and actually caring about the outcome. It pains me to put them in the same category as recruiters. These guys went so far above and beyond the call of duty, and have become ...
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05.16.08Damn TwitterI write this as I wait for a late train - the perfect time for a bit of Twitter action - but the service is down once more. Sure, their actual uptime rating might not be so bad, but it is one of those services that people (including me) really miss when it isn't there. Like a comfy pair of shoes, we don't appreciate it enough when it's here, but can't walk properly when it's gone. Or something. In any event, while I'd love to switch to a service with 100% uptime (which probably doesn't exist), I really do love Twitter. When ...
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04.14.08Released: Twitter Timeline Export (TweetDumpr)The general response to my hesitation on the release of my Twitter timeline export tool was that I should, indeed, release it. So I have. The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else's. Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new ...
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04.09.08Privacy Conundrum: Twitter Timeline ExportUpdate: I have now released the tool. As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user's entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time. Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful. After mentioning this to a couple of very smart ...
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03.08.08Twitter Weather BotYes, I've been at it again and developed another Twitter bot. What makes this one special, however, is the fact that it is my first interactive bot. So, I would like to introduce you all to @weatherbot - the interactive on-demand Twitter weather service. While it is still very beta, I think it is at a point where it is quite stable. To use it, all you have to do it follow the bot, then send it an @reply with the location you want the weather forecast for. In a few minutes, you should get a direct message from @weatherbot with ...
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01.17.08Addressing the Nation - Introducing BushbotThere have been way too many Twitter-related posts here lately, so I promise that this will be the last one for a while. In a similar vein to my triviabot, I have made a new Twitter bot called bushbot that, as the name implies, automatically posts random quotes from George W. Bush, President of the United States of America. Special thanks to Mr Auld for the quotes, and feel free to leave any feedback you might have.
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01.09.08Twitter Trivia BotAfter a suggestion from @abacab, I have created a little Twitter trivia bot. This bot posts a random fact from RandomFacts.org to its Twitter account every hour. There are some really interesting things coming through on it, so if you like trivia, give @triviabot a follow. I will be adding more features soon, such as being able to ask it questions and to play simple trivia games, but I have to work out the details first. If anyone has any other suggestions for bots or other Twitter scripts (or anything for that matter), feel free to drop a comment.
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01.03.08Twitter Stats on Google CodeI have created a Google Code page to house the source for Twitter Stats. Both the web version and the command line CSV-output version are available through a straight download or SVN. While the other contributors and I don't have a problem with derivative works (the code is released under the GPLv2 license), we would appreciate it if you instead thought about contributing back into the project. If you would like to contribute code, make a wiki page or contact me to become a member of the project so you can check-in using SVN. If you do choose to use some ...
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01.02.08Twitter Statistics ScriptFor all those Twitter lovers out there, like me, I've put together a little script based on the work found here to calculate some statistics from your Twitter timeline and present them using the Google Charts API. Statistics include: Tweets per hour of the day Total Tweets per day of the week Total Tweets per day of the month Top @replies Top overall @s Please keep in mind that there are probably a lot of bugs in it, and it can take a very long time to process if you have a large timeline. Other than that, enjoy!