Navarr's Tech Side

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.

• The ability to block someone from showing up in your timeline, but not block them from following you.
• The ability to allow users to send you DMs, even if they’re not following you (and block them from doing so on an individual basis).
• The ability to see all @replies from your friends – I WANT THIS BACK

That is all.

Well, being a PHP developer I quickly got excessively tired of looking for the proper Twitter Library with all the features that returned good results, and I got tired of looking for proper libraries and classes that could interface with OAuth.

Then, I found a relatively new (albeit “Beta”) Twitter OAuth Library, but it still required more steps than I really wanted to do just to get user authentication in a program.  So I decided to finally piece everything together and write Twitter API Library.

This library basically does everything you would expect it to do, except for Unauthenticated Requests and the Search API… I haven’t gotten around to coding that in yet, as it was not the primary focus of this library.

The library is not thoroughly tested, but theoretically shouldn’t encounter any errors.  I would be very grateful to anyone who’ll test it for me.  (I can’t work out the bugs without testers, so please, test!).

I’ve pushed a simple update to the SimpleTwitter JavaScript.  Change log (if its even needed) below.

• Support for Twitter Lists
  • Uses the same format as twitter, for example @navarr/shogi
• Support for Turled Profiles
  • Using the variable &turl=true will link @replies to turled beta-profiles instead of twitter profiles.
  • Surprisingly, this doesn’t break in co-ordination with lists.  It just doesn’t display the list.
• Uses Search API
  • We moved to the search API for retrieving tweets, as well as pulling a JSON file instead of XML.  This MAY BREAK your current implementation (though it should not).  If it does, you can use the older script by pulling old.php from the server instead of index.php

Yeah, that’s it.  Was thinking about making the default for &turl being true instead of false, but figured that’d probably annoy more people than it was worth (at least until I get turled to be of more use as a twitter replacement).

As seen in the image above, Twitter got a new following block to replace the small button they had previously, mimicking the same look and feed on the following and followers pages.

Recently, I had resumed working on the Simple Twitter Feed, and decided to make some improvements after reading Dave Winer’s "What am I up to?" post.

So, the Simple Twitter Feed has one fix, and four additional optional parameters.

The simple fix is that the count parameter would check the last (x) amount of tweets, whereas now it displays up to (x) amount of tweets.

This is code that I will kindly let anyone use.  It only works with public twitter accounts, however, but it is perfect for placing on any web page.

First we have the Inclusion of the File (can only be included once per page). Then the HTML for where the Twitter Feed is going to go, and then the JavaScript to include the file.

Code block
   
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.gtaero.net/twitter/twitter.php?user=USERNAME"></script>
<div id="twitFeed">Optional Placeholder Text</div>
<script type="text/javascript">twitter2id("twitFeed");</script>

Feel free to use this code anywhere you want to.  It is my gift to you!

UPDATE: Some additional (optional) variables have been added to the script for further tweaking.

February 24, 2008.

UPDATE: Support for twitter lists and turled profiles has been added to the script.  Your script might break with these changes, please view the post for more information.

October 30, 2009.