Elephantsquared. » twitter

Blackbird Pie: Fresh-baked tweets

George T — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:27:56 +0000

Just a few minutes ago, Twitter released this new cool tool, named as Blackbird Pie. What this does is generate a static HTML tweet which you can use as you want.

So, we decided to take the janky script we’ve been using to generate static HTML tweets for posts (like the one you see here), polish it up a bit, and make it public. And if tweets really are the new quotes, this should come in handy: Blackbird Pie.

Just go to media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ and enter the tweet url that you want to use to generate your static HTML tweet. Moreover, the code generated there seems to be sufficiently customizable and when you paste it into your site, the tweet will pick up some of your styling. Shorter code and better timestamp are coming soon, too.

We’ll likely tweak the appearance of these tweets over time as we get feedback and bug reports – so do drop us a line at @twittermedia.

What do you think?

TweetNotebook, your Twitter Notebook

George T — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:37:57 +0000

How would you like a notebook that is so unique as your tweets? TweetNotebook is a new interesting service that lets you create your personalized notebook with your own tweets on every page!

With ‘TweetNotebook’ you can create a unique notebook in seconds. At the bottom of each page, you’ll find 1 tweet you’ve posted on twitter.

Just enter your Twitter username and TweetNotebook will select the best of your tweets and create your notebook in seconds.

3 reasons why I believe Google Buzz has already won

George T — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:55:04 +0000

I am sure you ‘ve heard of the latest Google product named Buzz, right? I am still waiting to see the Buzz link inside my Gmail. What about you? I have already commented/liked a couple of Buzz(es) till now. And for the last hour or so I ‘ve been looking around for some Buzz^2. For the time being I can already give you 3 reasons why I believe Google Buzz has already won.

It uses Google Accounts

There is so little chance that you don’t have a Google Account these days. What about a Google Profile? With Google Buzz your Google Profile is now getting in action. Featuring followers/following, public Buzz timeline with likes, comments, maps and more. Have you been using OpenID lately? Which account provider do you use the most? I bet Google is your first choice (if applicable).

It’s not a first mover

As Robert (Scoble) has mentioned before “The problem is that first mover rarely wins“. The thing is, Google is not a first mover in this. Google Buzz takes advantage of some of the most intriguing and successful existing features in other web services like FriendFeed and Twitter. It has incuded the Followers/Following feature which has proved its popularity in the latest years (see Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.). It also uses Google Reader’s and FriendFeed’s Like feature. The appearance of Google Buzz is very FriendFeed-like. I am not sure if Google Buzz can succeed where FriendFeed couldn’t, but I bet this time Google’s social fight/attempt will turn out successful.

It is made of PubSubHubbub

It’s real-time. Enough said.

There are also a few other stuff that make Google Buzz stand out. For instance, have you tried editing you comment or removing your “like”? See what happens to that buzz mail in your inbox?

Twitter: Project Code Swarm

George T — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:50:46 +0000

Twitter Code Swarm is a very interesting visualization of the explosive growth of Twitter as a development platform. The video below illustrates the amount of work it takes to build something as seemingly simple as a website that lets you publish 140 character status updates.

The “recording” period starts in April 2006 and ends in January 2010. Enjoy!

Did you noticed the music playing? Have you played the Braid game?

P.S. Project code_swarm is also available on Google Code and github.

[ via ]

Brizzly – Twitter enhanced

George T — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:45:01 +0000

I got my Brizzly invitation last night. When you first activate your account you will be asked to link your Twitter account. After that you can explore every aspect of this new service. In short you may say Brizzly is Twitter enhanced. It has everything Twitter has like Search, Trends and Saved Searches and extends by including a few more amazing features that make Brizzly stand out, like:

inline display of video, images, and maps
trending topics with context
multiple account support
photo upload
groups
muting
drafts

Apart from that, Brizzly’s user interface is also as simple as Twitter’s giving you the option to choose between Standard (which looks like almost exactly like Twitter’s UI) and Wide view. There are also a few other minor things that you may be familiar with such as typing ‘j’ and ‘k’ to scroll tweets up and down.

Warning: After joining Brizzly, there is a chance you may never have to login via twitter.com again. :P

Here is an introduction to Brizzly, the new social media reader from Thing Labs. Enjoy!

Twitter downtime, Forbidden

George T — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:00:23 +0000

Twitter downtime is here once again. This time we got an 403 Error. HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden, states that the web server thinks that the data stream sent by the client was correct but the access to resource identified by the url is forbidden for some reason. Fortunately, everything came back online very soon.

Twitter’s New Terms of Service, themes and typography

George T — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:28:53 +0000

Twitter keeps evolving, trying to serve and manage more information and getting more serious this time. Today there is update in Twitter’s Terms of Services saying more or less something like “Hey, you know what? It’s time to get serious.” Some of the new highlights from the new “Terms” include Advertising (we live in an Ad-world after all), Twitter APIs, which means more and better applications, Spam rules, and last but not least Ownership. According to Twitter, the Ownership part can be summarized to this:

Twitter means ditter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

In addition, Twitter added four new themes and in case you haven’t noticed it, the typography of the number of the followers and following links changed.

UPDATE: after some conversation with some friends, typography looks the same (according to them :P)

Twitter downtime, Service unavailable

George T — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:26:58 +0000

One again twitter has fallen into a 503 http error for a few minutes this morning. The error was fixed and everything came back online in a very short period of time.