TweepML – Share Lists Of Twitter Users
Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | Open Source, Tools, Twitter, Utilities | No Comments
Just came across a new service that’s been officially approved by Twitter.com: introducing TweepML, an XML based format for sharing lists of twitter user accounts. If you know what OPML is then you already know the concept behind TweepML, it provides a free universal framework for importing, exporting and creating twitter ‘groups’ that can be shared or even stored as a backup of important accounts. The main website, www.tweepml.org, also includes a free follow tool that helps streamline following lists of users via your twitter account.
On the site it has various libraries and examples available to aid developers in implementing TweepML into new or existing apps. Currently the most popular lists seem to be the ones with the largest number of followers. I’d be willing to bet good money that this is already being used by spammers and/or marketers to cultivate their own twitter accounts targeting various ‘groups’ featured on the site…but then again, almost every tool or platform that is useful has the potential for grey/blackhat usage.
Interesting new format, it’s definitely going to make twitter account sharing (not to mention account duplication) a lot easier!
found via mashable
your.FlowingData – Collect Data About Yourself With Twitter
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Marketing, Research, Tools, Twitter, WebApps, analytics | No Comments
Now you can track all your twitter movements automatically with the latest FREE research tool just released by FlowingData. Appropriately named your.flowingdata, it’s only a quick 2 minute setup and then the webapp will start collecting all of your twitter data for you to later explore with built-in tools that resemble IBM’s Many Eyes dashboard. As with any behavioral analysis tool, the more data you have the better the results will be so I can easily see this tool being widely used by researchers and interactive planners alike for a seriously long time (I wonder if they have any personal database limitations that would prevent one infinite 365 day data-stream?). Worried about exposing your private twitter habits? Have no fear my friend, all the data collected is automatically set to ‘private.’ If at a later date you’d like to release it to the masses then that’ll be up to you, but for all you tin-foil hat wearing twitter users – you’re secrets are still safe.
Here are some screen shots showing a sampling of the reports that are built-in to the dashboard, they look amazing!
Launch Your Own Twitter Bot (PHP, Python, Ruby)
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | Hack, Mashup, Open Source, RSS, Tools, Twitter, code | 2 Comments
If you use twitter you’ve undoubtably come across a twitter bot, sadly there’s a very good chance it was because it was spamming you. In this post I’ll provide you with all the tools, source code and know-how to be able to build and launch your own twitter bot, and i’ll even give you resources to do it in the programming language of your choice. Why? Because there are so many positive uses for a twitter bot….including anti-spam! Go take a look at the twitter tag project for some good examples of bots currents on twitter if you’re not able to come up with any on your own.
First, if you’d like to fool around with an automated bot on twitter but lack the technical knowhow, go pay a visit to the Botomatic site. There you can create your own bot using their easy-to-use GUI. It’ll take you two seconds and you will be up and running.
If you’re a beginner, have no fear there’s a pre-configured setup for you as well. Go download and install the Twitterbotscript from Tyler Colwell. It’s 100% free and was coded to include a helpful GUI to control the bot functionality. It’s actually a pretty cool package that uses the API. I’ve taken a lot of his code and re-used it in various test bots of my own so i’d definitely recommend anyone looking to script their own bot in PHP to download his app.
Now for the PHP programmers out there, the first example of a great PHP5 twitter bot framework is from the folks over at ohloh.net (Jason Allen and Scott Collison). This one is setup to allow you to search and retweet what you’ve found.
If you’d like to incorporate Jabber/XMPP into the bot (that way you can access it via gchat), then there’s a great tutorial over on jazzychad.com. Tenderapp.com has on their blog a PHP tutorial with full source-code for a twitter bot that will look up the traffic conditions and tweet them when messaged. This one also has a walk-through for getting it up on xmpp/jabber. Here’s the source for a similar bot that looks up the weather and retweets it on command.
If you’d like to setup a twitter bot using Python, Halotis.com has a great tutorial that uses a sqlite backend to keep track of what it’s messaged. For a more elaborate version of an automated bot using python, there’s a script over on the flowingdata.com blog that also incorporates a local mail server to send and receive messages to the bot.
Last but not least, all of you Ruby folks….here’s a Twitter Ruby Gem to go along with the Twitter4R and Twitter Ruby Gems already found in the library. The site also takes you through a few different commands available with this new gem. For complete source-code of a twitter bot written in Ruby, head on over to this snippet of a Ruby RSS Twitter Bot.
Easy as pie and now you’ve got your very own automated twitter bot!
Twitter Exploit – User Was Able To Register @hOME
Monday, July 6th, 2009 | Hack, Twitter, Unusual | No Comments
I did a google search for ‘twitter’ the other day and the strangest result showed up as #2. Look at the way home was spelled = hOME….
That was odd for a number of reasons, the biggest being that the URL alias for your profile page (if you’re logged in to your twitter account) is www.twitter.com/home. Twitter has never (to the best of my knowledge) been caps sensitive, meaning that if you registered your username as @tonythetiger, you could capitalize it in any way, shape or form and it will still always take you to the same page.
BUT! If you go visit that url ( twitter.com/hOME), you’ll find that it’s a dormant account that just so happens to have 28k+ followers! Now just for comparison go and try to visit twitter.com/home. See what I’m talking about! It takes you to either your profile page or the main twitter.com homepage!
Here’s another oddity about this account – 95% of @hOME’s followers joined twitter.com on one of two days. Strange coincidence don’t you think?
So what I’m guessing happened was a potential spammer discovered that twitter allowed him to register @hOME so he loaded up 28k of new twitter accounts to make it look like it was a popular user. What happened after that is anybody’s guess, the twitter account has 0 tweets and isn’t following anyone back. If you know anything about this account, please tell us more!
WordPress 2.8 Released
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | Blogging, News, Site Information, Software Update | No Comments
The folks over at Automattic just released the stable 2.8 version of popular blogging platform WordPress. This site, along with a large percentage of blogs out there, runs on the WordPress platform and I can’t say enough about all the features and SEO-friendly options that it has built-in to the base version (not to mention all the free plugins and themes available on their site).
Over 790 bugs were fixed from the previous 2.7.1 version not to mention they claim it’s supposed to be a lot faster (that has yet to be seen). Some of the new features can be found under the Appearance section of the backend, from a re-designed widgets section to the addition of convenient “Activate, Preview and Delete” quick-links underneath each theme. If you’re trying to decide between a few themes or just like to keep a lot available, this will undoubtably save you a lot of time.
Some highlights of the updated features are:
- New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
- Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
- Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
- Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
- Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
- Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
- Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
So if you haven’t logged into the back-end of your own WordPress blog lately, now’s the time to do it and use their automatic upgrade feature! That or you can find the download page (as well as instructions for how to install or upgrade) here. You can also view the complete list of updates and bug fixes on their development site.
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