Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11308460

Twitter is getting a revamped design it seems. From my quick skim read it seems that images and videos will be integrated into tweets rather than through a link and the main reading pane will be split in two. One will be for every tweet in the main time line, and the other will be the people you follow.

How this effects Twitter clients I don't know.. I presume that most people, like me, don't actually use the Twitter website.

It doesn't effect Twitter clients at all. 60-something % of Twitter users use the website, so this is a bigger change than you think. Along with their new in-house URL shortening service, this is aimed at making the site stickier and less of a launching pad for external links. The UI, from the screenshots I've seen, look quite similar to the new iPad client.

I wonder if they've got rid of the awful alert box confirmations when you delete a tweet or direct message.

God, I hate alert boxes.

Is this the perfered way to announce an 'I'm going to play this, anyone want to join'?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1177

ok thanks

Oh, it looks like the @beexgames thing has been broken since the change to OAuth in Twitter. I will fix that in the next few days. In the mean time, I've made it follow the people it hadn't followed so far.

Ah, that'll be why no one joined me for Horde the other night.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I listened to about 10 minutes of that, and then turned it off, as it wasn't funny at all. Like most of his stuff.

Maybe he was funny years back, but now, no I don't think so.

To be fair to AIOTM, it took about seven episodes to hit its stride. The 'bullying' of Andrew Collins is no more bullying than when you take the piss out of your mates, imo.

Shall I skip to episode 8, then?

Oh bugger, I appear to have become infected with today's plague.

I wondered what was going on with everyone's Twitter. Don't think it happened to mine. What is it and why's it happening?

seems to be some sort of twitter virus (in the form of js and css based scripting doing automatic retweets and such) going down, I know it got kern, and then I got it too, now I can't post at all, as this layer is "above" what I normally click on, and is "grabbing" each click for it's own ends...

Malc

is this on the twitter.com site itself?

Yes. It's javascript injection into the body of a tweet that makes you repost the virus. Doesn't seem to do anything else (no password stealing etc) and only effects twitter.com on the old UI.

can't use my phone (and presumably any other client) to delete my tweets either, as I have exceeded my rate limit

Malc

Oh crap.

Best stay away from it for a bit then. Know of any decent web interfaces that I can switch over to and delete messages from?

I'd avoid all web interfaces. Any of them might be vulnerable. If you're desperate, try Brizzly, but don't mouse over any tweets.

The problem is, if it loads the tweet, part of the code is putting (I assume) a semi transparent <div> layer (forgive if I'm getting this wrong it's been over 5 years since I did webdev) over the top of the whole twitter page which is one big <a href> which is calling more js, and trying to send dms and do all sorts of crap.

Malc

http://mobile.twitter.com seems to be immune; if you log in and go to http://mobile.twitter.com/yourname then you should be able to delete the offending tweets.

FTFY

But my audience! They'll be Tim Vine less!

Thanks. Trying to clear my tweets now.

Worth bearing that site in mind for the future - I'm in a wifi blackspot at work so don't have the wifi password setup on my ipod.

Well, I think it'd be nice to try and clean up your own timeline so you don't, in turn, infect others.

It didn't seem to be affecting me on Tweetdeck, but I shut it down just in case. Also, not much point having it on if everyone is just splurging out code.

Javascript injections: humorous when used via twitter on http://www.conservatives.com but not any other time.

If you're desperate, ditch Twitter (it sux foetid dingo's kidneys anyway) and swap to Plurk.

Bah! Forgot about the forced retweet.

Trying to tidy...

Thanks for the help everyone.

It's fixed.

So, re-tweets.

I use the Twitter for iPhone app.

I can see what I have re-tweeted.
I can see what others have re-tweeted.
I can even see which tweets of mine have been re-tweeted by others.

What I cannot see is WHO has retweeted them. Is there any way of doing this, as it bugs me to not know.

No. It's crap. http://favstar.fm/users/DoctorCuriosity will show you some of them though.

The network bods have done a quick check and discovered that about 40% of our first-year students have never opened their university email account. As students often complain about not being told about IT issues (planned outages, upgrades and the like) I've suggested that social networks might be a useful tool. My reward for offering that suggestion was being tasked with investigating Twitter.

Getting students to follow a specific account is one thing, finding and dealing with specific mentions is another. The problem is, the uni has a really generic name containing a very commonly used word and it's hard to search for anything without getting a slew of other stuff. I have no idea how to filter out the other stuff to get to the tweets that might possibly mention the uni. It's the complainers we have to catch you see.

Any suggestions?

Why not ask them to give you their own email addresses as part of their enrolment?

There'd be some issue about communication boundaries if we started spamming their personal email addresses. We have their mobile numbers, but I reckon there'd be an uprising if we SMS'ed them

Can't win... don't try.

WTF? They were taken/given for a reason.

The college being able to email/text me was pretty handy when they actually remembered to do it.
"Lecture's cancelled" saved me a two hour wasted journey.
"Essay/report for whatever is due tomorrow" didn't help me much but it saved a few folk's arses.
"Library's closed" saved me a flight of stairs

One of my college's rules was that students were obliged to check their university email accounts regularly (I think it laid down a time frame). It was probably so someone couldn't use 'I didn't get the email' as an excuse, but I'm not sure it was actively enforced.

You're not going to be able to magically detect all mentions of a generic string on Twitter that matter to you without picking up the ones that don't.

Aye, I know. That's the problem.

You could change the name of your university to something unique. "University of Maex^a4J" would probably cut down on false matches.

Heh.

Problem is, even it was called THE UNIVERSITY OF XCVZXCZ, student's still wouldn't type anything recognisable into twitter when complaining. Mainly it's just unfocussed mutterings

"fucking uni network down again. Teh suxxors"
"can't print, how lame"
"that IT guy is fit"

I reckon it'd work best as footnote to posters and the like and allow students to follow as they see fit.

LOL

Scunthorpe?

In other news, I am on twitter as Alarm_

Follow me and you can enjoy disappointment over and over again.

DavPaz, why not announce the username. Then people properly complaining will copy in the @address to get attention, same as what people do on here to the likes of O2 and royalmail.

That's the route I've recommended. Great minds, etc

Just as long as they don't report unfunny jokes to the police.