twitter

Apr 14, 2014 ∞

You don't have to tweet for Twitter to consider you an active user

You don’t have to tweet for Twitter to consider you an active user

Yoree Koh reporting at The Wall Street Journal:

Twitter said it has 241 million monthly active users the last three months of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. By Twitter’s standards, a person does not have to tweet to be considered a monthly active user.

I would think active users tweet and passive users only read. If I was considered an active user of every platform I sign into in a month, I would be considered far more active than I really am.

Jan 19, 2014 ∞

Who cares if I think this link leads to a silly blog post at Forbes.com?

No one. Least of all I.

I just wrote too many words about why I think the post I link to above isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s transmitted over, but I was being tired and petty and shitting on the good-natured opinion of someone more successful than I, so I deleted those words.

I’m embarrassed I wrote the first version of this note, but I give myself a few points for having published this far more self-aware and candid revision.

Sep 11, 2013 ∞

Daniel Victor of the New York Times shows us how to be a reporter even on Twitter

This is a great story precisely because Victor wasn’t writing a blog post about how to properly commit journalism on Twitter, he was properly committing journalism on Twitter.

Jul 29, 2013 ∞

Twitter user arrested for threatening to rape and murder female activist

I wrote recently about my disappointment with Twitter’s response to a woman deluged with rape threats. Today, David Edwards of t The Raw Story reports that a man has been arrested in England for threats made against Caroline Criado-Perez.

Twitter said in a statement to Sky News :

[the] ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.

Good idea, let’s make that a priority.

Jul 27, 2013 ∞

Twitter UK chief responds to abuse concerns after campaigner is deluged with rape threats

This is a disturbing story, but more broadly it represents a big step backward for a company otherwise known for standing up for its users.

Jon Russell, writing at The Next Web:

Wang said, via Twitter, that the company was unable to discuss the specifics of the incident because “we don’t comment on individual accounts.” That position was echoed in a statement that Twitter provided to the BBC.

That’s unacceptable. It’s one thing to give the silent treatment to feature requests and “first world problem” complaints. But it’s another thing entirely when someone is being deluged with threats and then sees their own account suspended when they reach out about it.

Twitter is lucky it has built up so much goodwill among users and the press, because it burned much of it off with this serious misstep.

Apr 5, 2013 ∞

Twitter Arrives on Wall Street, Via Bloomberg

Interesting news, but someone call the design police: there’s a crime being committed at every Bloomberg terminal on Wall Street. It’s 2013 and it looks like financial professionals are daily being punished with truly awful interface design. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

Mar 25, 2013 ∞

Easily fake a tweet from anyone's account

Easily fake a tweet from anyone’s account

I wonder whether Twitter can eliminate the potential for this stuff, because Shawn King of The Loop is right: it definitely raises concerns for journalists, not to mention anyone whose account lends credence to the crazy things you might say with this hack.

Mar 5, 2013 ∞

Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they're also killing

Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they’re also killing

I admit, squeezing the entire post into the title is lazy, but at least it’s informative. I’ll link to Twitter’s death notice for Posterous and call it a post.

Feb 24, 2013 ∞

Twitter kills my favorite Twitter app for Android

In August, Twitter turned its back on the sort of independent developers who built their community for them. Now, my favorite Twitter app for Android, Falcon Pro, has hit Twitter’s artificial user limit.

They have other apps, (like an incredible widget that is also a fully-functional Twitter client), but they can’t accept any more Falcon Pro users.

Falcon Pro’s left- and right-drawer layout, with an elegant, clutter-free but feature-packed design, won me over instantly. It came out just as I had given up on Carbon for Twitter, a beautiful app nearly dismissed as vaporware as it faced numerous release setbacks.

Carbon finally came out, and it is very pretty, but Falcon Pro fits my personal Twitter use case best, so Carbon is a close second. You know what isn’t even in the top five? Twitter’s official Android client.

Over 3,000 people have signed a petition to raise Falcon Pro’s limit as of Saturday night, but that’s at Twitter’s absolute discretion, and it would set a bad precedent, so I’m not holding my breath.

But if you tried out Falcon Pro and didn’t like it, you can revoke the app’s access to your Twitter account, thereby freeing up a token for a new user. Redditor classic_schmosby explains in this comment.

Twitter: You can’t build and maintain a thriving ecosystem with token limits and patronizing blog posts about “building user value.” You will never offer a sufficient variety of apps to please all use cases. Your developer community fosters a massive user base that may not otherwise come to or stay with Twitter, pumping data into your system for you to monetize. Developers get and keep users for you by offering designs, features, and improvements that you cannot provide. Don’t stifle that, celebrate it.

Nov 8, 2012 ∞

Twitter and Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication is a pain in the ass. Just ask my Google account or my Dropbox account. But it’s a no-brainer. Savvy users will flock to it, seeing the value in the headache. Less-than-savvy users don’t need to be forced into it, but Twitter is as good a platform as any to explain to folks why it’s worth the additional steps to log in sometimes.

Oct 25, 2012 ∞

More interactive Tweets, in more than 2000 ways

What ever happened to seeing a link and clicking on it? I don’t want garish, heavy embedded crap all over Twitter. But alas, it’s not my company or design to screw up, so I’ll stop whining (but not sulking).

Oct 9, 2012 ∞

Twitter List Copy

I just completely overhauled my Twitter lists, a few days after impulsively unfollowing everyone who didn’t follow me back. I deleted many lists and added many users to the ones I kept. I used Twitter List Copy to import all the users on other people’s lists into pre-existing lists of my own.

It uses oAuth so it’s password-free, and despite the disclaimer on the site, it seems to merge imported users with your pre-existing lists just fine. Thanks to Noah Liebman, who built this awesome tool. Follow him on Twitter or check out his website.

Sep 25, 2012 ∞

Twitter replies and Instapaper integration

I wanted to post something brief to let you know I made a few small but (I think) useful additions to this site.

First, I’ve added a button to the bottom of all posts letting Twitter users reply or ask questions directly from the post. Thanks to the purveyor of kaos.am for unknowingly alerting me to this classy and subtle way to allow some direct communication without resorting to comments. Find more info on my no-comments policy here.

Second, all of my article posts now include a “Read Later” button that will send that post to your Instapaper account. If you don’t have an Instapaper account, you should consider getting one. It’s not free, but it’s worth paying for the knowledge that it won’t “pivot” or become ad-ridden sometime down the road. Instapaper also innovates frequently, doing things like Kindle integration and fonts for vision-impaired readers before anyone else.

Third, I’ve added some more feed options to the site. The original Tumblr feed is still available. However, you can now choose between a master feed including all updates, a links-only feed that only includes the links I share (updated at least once a day), or an articles-only feed that includes only longer articles (updated at least once a week). Find more information here.

That’s it. I hope you find at least one of these additions useful. I don’t plan to add to this site very often, as part of the goal in building it was to keep it clean and content-focused.

Sep 22, 2012 ∞

Planet of the Tweets

Twitter’s extensive research identified four ways news outlets can better engage their audiences.

Funny how all four look like things Twitter’s early and most “engaged” users have been doing since the service’s inception.

The same users Twitter is frequently screwing with reckless abandon these days.

Don’t you see? We gave them the tools to leverage increased brand engagement (buzzword overload!).

Kind of like how the planet of the apes wasn’t another planet at all…

Sep 20, 2012 ∞

Twitter changes force removal of related IFTTT triggers

IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets, in an email to users today:

[ … ] on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed.

IFTTT is everything Yahoo Pipes could have been and I’ve been using several Twitter triggers for a long time, to do things like save my tweets to Evernote and add favorite tweets to Instapaper.

My “Twitter” tag is becoming so littered with the company’s user-hostile decisions and their unfortunate consequences that, soon, it will make more sense to post something when and if they ever put users first again.

Here’s the full email from IFTTT’s Linden:

Dear joeross,

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.

At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.

We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.

Linden Tibbets IFTTT CEO

*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).

Sep 19, 2012 ∞

Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience

Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:

Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.

Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.

Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.

That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.

Sep 14, 2012 ∞

Twitter forced to turn over protester's deleted tweets

Twitter forced to turn over protester’s deleted tweets

Mike Isaac, writing at All Things D:

In the end, the New York DA and the judge used a legal maneuver to put pressure on Twitter, threatening to hold the company in contempt of court and levy steep fines if it didn’t hand over the data.

You can’t say they didn’t try.

They have even appealed the judge’s threat to hold them in contempt. The envelope—yes, a physical envelope—containing the tweets at issue will remain sealed until that appeal is complete.

I’ve said it before: it may not be a good time to be a third-party Twitter developer, but the company truly goes to bat for its users when it’s appropriate.

Aug 29, 2012 ∞

Twitter files appeal in major social media case

Jeff John Roberts provides an update on Twitter’s latest legal battle over at GigaOM. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter is living two lives:

They’re vigorously defending the rights of their users to maintain control over what happens to their tweets with regard to the government. They’re also perfecting a a cold hostility toward third-party developers.

These two strategies feel, for obvious reasons, very different from one another. But they are both directed at achieving the same two goals:

to maximize the user-base, particularly to keep Twitter attractive to dissidents, protesters, journalists, and others whose use cases may involve sensitive or vulnerable action or information
to maximize Twitter’s control over user-generated content (mostly individual tweets) and how it is consumed by users

It’s a great time to be a Twitter user who is happy with the service’s in-house apps and undaunted by their increasing bloat. It is a very bad time to be someone interested in providing Twitter users with a better experience that Twitter itself is willing or able to do.

Aug 23, 2012 ∞

Tent - the decentralized social web

Tent is decentralized, not federated or centralized. Any Tent server can connect to any other Tent server. All features are available to any server as first-class citizens. Anyone can host their own Tent server. Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists. Anyone can write applications that connect to Tent in order to display or create user content.

Is it Diaspora? Is it IRC? Is it Twitter? Is it Wordpress?

Well, I think, yes. And no.

Twitter’s recent adoption of a hostile stance toward its developer community and, to some extent, its users, is catalyzing the market for alternatives. Matthew Panzarino reports at The Next Web that they cut off Tumblr’s ability to help you find Twitter friends who also use Tumblr, as they did with Instagram.

Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API

Twitter’s Michael Sippey posted an update at their Developers Blog yesterday announcing that the company will:

essentially be crippling many of the third-party apps that got the company where it is today; and
severely bloating and degrading the user experience

Of course, that’s my take on it. Read the linked post and feel free to draw your own conclusions, but I’m willing to bet that they’ll be similar to mine…

Taken as a whole, the changes at Twitter are probably the most powerful form of advertising Dalton Caldwell's new App.net could possibly have imagined.

Further reading

"Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes" by Marco Arment at Marco.org
"Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients, tightens API rules to direct users to official apps" by Matthew Panzarino at The Next Web

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