Twitter Annotation Proposal – Image
This is a proposal for a twitter annotation that I hope to be blessed by both the development community and twitter itself.
Image Namespace
Images are something commonly shared throughout twitter. Something that would be fantastically idealistic would be embedding image data into twitter annotations.
Due to constraints, images should be resized to a lower-quality “preview”. Possibly VGA or so? A link to a privately hosted image should also be available.
Using the current preview information supplied by the twitter development team, I imagine that it would go something like this:
"image": { "preview": "data here.. base64 etc.", "preview_encode": "base64", // Or whatever else floats your boat. "bin" or "binary" for raw data. "full_src": "http://example.org/link/to/image.jpg" }
Any additional thoughts on other information that should be included? Maybe a title and description, or is that not needed? Please, leave all of your thoughts and ideas in the comments!
Why SuperTweets won’t kill URL Shorteners
Now, the title of this blog post makes it sound like I’m going to write an essay about why SuperTweets (and the probability of them having a URL metadata for tweets) will not be killing URL Shorteners like j.mp and bit.ly anytime soon.
1) URL Shorteners Keep You Safe
One of the things URL shorteners do now is they keep you safe from malicious websites. You can preview the site you are visiting, and if its determined to be delicious the short URL will either be deleted or blocked or a warning will be shown, letting you know it is no longer safe to visit that URL.
2) URL Shorteners are Branded
All I really have to say here is “Bit.ly Pro” URL Shorteners now have custom branding, so it makes it even easier to send people to your website or promote your brand on twitter by including the link in the text.
3) URL Shorteners are Easy to Remember
When they are used correctly. Services like bit.ly allow you to give a custom name to your short link. This is especially useful in media such as Television or Print: http://j.mp/cnn-transgender is much easier to remember and type than www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/04/14/transgender.irpt/index.html?hpt=C1
With even just these three simple reasons in mind, it is very clear to me that URL shorteners will not be dying anytime soon, no matter how much metadata you can attach to tweets. I’m not even sure they’re bad for the internet, anymore.
Google Voice is still Lacking
I’ve been a religious Google Voice user for awhile now, so it really bothers me that it is still lacking feature wise. Of course, I’ve been helping with some of these missing features (re: Google Voice for Outlook) but there are still plenty more missing as well as some minor issues I have with the service.
Multimedia Messaging (MMS)
For some reason, Google Voice still lacks this functionality. It can’t be THAT difficult, can it? I mean, the iPhone managed to add it before Google Voice, and if you really want to compete in the mobile business, its kind of necessary to have MMS, as SMS is pretty much irrelevant now.
Not only that, but any MMS that is sent to a Google Voice number is just lost. Couldn’t they at least be forwarded to my email address? I don’t like the fact that I could be losing incoming messages to /dev/null, and its even more annoying having to give out two different phone numbers (one for MMS and one for SMS).
Shortcodes
It is all well and good that Google’s own shortcodes work through Google Voice, but not so fantastic that nobody else’s does. I don’t want to be passing around two sets of phone numbers, and I’d love the ability to just set to spam a shortcode that is getting out of hand and won’t let me unsubscribe (if that ever happens). Developers pay tons of money to set up shortcodes, so why doesn’t Google Voice support them?
API
Google Voice is a Service. I use it with my cell, with my home phone, and with my computer. But in order to make desktop apps or things like Google Voice for Outlook possible, an API is almost necessary. I’ve managed to do it without one, but it still pretty much sucks.
Outlook Mobile Service
Companies charge tons of money for people to have the ability to send text messages through Microsoft Outlook. Adding the very simplistic SOAP server to the Google Voice backend would allow anyone with Microsoft Office to send text messages, forward emails, and receive reminders and notifications for FREE, something that is usually charged 10 cents or more per message. (Combine this with MMS as mentioned above, and it gets EVEN BETTER!)
Internet Fax Service
Google Voice already has “Receive Faxes” as a “Suggest a Feature.” Adding this and providing users on computers a way to send faxes would increase productivity and make the service even more useful to small companies and freelancers.
Keep in mind, these are just a few ways that Google could improve Google Voice, there are tons more.
What do you want to see added?
TwCLI
So, you think you’ve had a lot of fun with twitter on the web and all those twitter clients you’ve played around with? What if I told you that you haven’t seen anything yet? What if I told you that you could use Twitter in a TRUE Command Line Interface with specific commands for interacting with twitter.
Welcome to one of my latest and greatest creations, TwCLI.
TwCLI supports almost everything twitter has to offer, and will soon be expanding to support even more! 
TwCLI includes a long list of commands, help information for each command, a theme-able interface (Specify a Pre-Determined theme, import from your twitter profile, or even specify an external CSS file!), Geo-Location, Retweets, and even Contributor Support!
Go ahead, give it a try and tell me what you think!
Rumor: Twitter Close to Unveiling Contributions
Do I know for sure? Absolutely not. Do I have inside information? Absolutely not. Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that seemed to push me to think in this direction? Yes.
Back in December, Twitter blogged about its “feature test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter. One that would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute that post to the user who wrote it.
If you wanted to see this in action, all you would have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of the employees.
They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @CoTweet and @HootSuite. But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.
Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th. HootSuite has only one, posted on February 18th (none earlier, and none later). This brings to mind: Twitter must have recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this to be coincidence?
And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday, March 1st 2009.
All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to rolling out Contributions. Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since everybody already knows about it. Then again, maybe they won’t.
simpleTAPI is Broken
Apparently I’ve completely broken simpleTAPI somewhere between Build 27 and Build 30. I thought I had fixed it with Build 29, but it seems that I was mistaken.
In lieu of this, I am putting simpleTAPI on a temporary hiatus. I will be re-constructing it from scratch (though, probably looking back and using a good bit of the original code). The next version should have several configurable options, and will hopefully interact with the Twitter API much better than the previous versions.
Build 30 was supposed to return results as an array([“TAPI”] => data, [“result”] => data). But all I’m getting from it at the moment is “Unable to Authenticate User.”
Those wanting to use simpleTAPI should use Build 27, though you will have to deal with some minor quirks in the way results are returned. (the TAPI array is simply appended to the results array, making things slightly complicated if you don’t unset($result[“TAPI”]);
What will be simpleTAPI 0.4 should have better error handling, better return data, and better built-in caching. I’m also hoping to build in support for xAuth and Delegated OAuth, if at all possible. (Though probably not since simpleTAPI is built upon another OAuth library).
So, I’m asking for any and all feature requests. Is there something about simpleTAPI you don’t like or want to be improved? Please, post in the comments below!
simpleTAPI v0.2.1 – Build 16 (Twitter API Library)
I’ve renamed the Twitter API Library to “simpleTAPI.” Yes, I’m not very good at names when it comes to this sort of thing. We’ve jumped forward two builds since my last post here.
Build 15
- The addition of a quick variable, bool Twitter::geo_enabled.
Returns TRUE if the user has turned on geo functionality, FALSE if not.
Version 0.2.1
- Re-Organized classes. Separated TwitterOAuth and OAuth into separate files, and moved them along with Twitter into a “twitter” folder. All classes can be loaded simply by including Twitter.lib.php.
Build 16
- Fixed a minor inconsistency in TWML where different functions returned different links to a twitter user’s profile.
- Fixed a bug where specifying screennameonly=TRUE for TWML::name resulted in an empty hyperlink.
Examples
- Started work on Example files to teach how to use simpleTAPI. Currently, the only one included is a basic Update script. This file includes logging in, updating a status, and returning the same status as well as some basic TWML examples.
So, enjoy! I will continue to improve this library. Please remember to post all issues and feature requests either on this blog or the github page.
Twitter API Library Build 12
If you’ve been watching this blog, you’ll notice I skipped Build 11 – It was small, and was trumped by its quick replacement – Build 12. Builds 11 and 12 fixed five previous known issues, while build 12 fixed a non-issue with build 11. Fixes listed below:
- The following now work with all users:
- Twitter::get_sn_from_id()
- Twitter::get_name_from_id()
- Twitter::get_id_from_sn()
- TWML::name()
- TWML::profile_pic()
- Addition of User Cache commands for use by TWML and the get_x_from_y() commands.
As always, the most recent build is available at github.
Twitter API Library Version 0.2 Build 10
I pushed Version 2 Build 10 of the Twitter API Library to github. This new version still does not fix any of the previous errors, so the changelog is quite minor.
- Updated to TwitterOAuth v0.2-beta
- "fixes several bugs"
- Support for OAuth 1.0a
- Added a boolean return to require_login().
Twitter API Library Build 9
I’ve pushed Build 9 of the Twitter API Library to github today. Interesting thing, it adds a few missing API features but does not yet fix any of the previous problems.
New features are all Authenticated API Calls:
- search
- trends
- trends_current
- trends_daily
- trends_weekly
- users_search
- trends_available
- trends_location
Yes, that means that we’ve added support for the following portions of the twitter api:
- Search
- Trends
- User Search
- Local Trends
Enjoy, and as always please report any and all errors you get.