twitter

Sep 01 2010

Pidgin and OAUth

So earlier today the nice folks over at twitter figured it was a good time to change all the authentication to oauth ... they might have announced it all over the place .. but it never catched my attention

The onlything that did catch my attention was that after not having ued pidgin for about 2 weeks I didn't have access to twitter anymore.

I`m using the purple-microblog plugin and the default version of that plugin in Fedora 12 wasn't really up2date. The plugin supports OAuth as of 3.0 which was released ages ago.

The version in fedora-updates-testing however was already recent enough ..

So enabling that repo and running
yum  update  purple-microblog
quickly solved my proble .. till I disabled twitter in my pidgin again as there was way to much talk about some weird fruit ...

Feb 12 2010

Irc vs Twitter err.. Identi.ca

Over 1.5 decade ago, a bunch of us were addicted to irc, I lived on channels such as #coders, #nlcoders, #demoscene, sneaked in on #vlaanderen to see when the Leuven locals were heading to the pub, then started joining multiple Linux and Open Source related channels around 94...

Then some weirdos had an alternative way of chatting ICQ, then the folks from Redmond reinvented the wheel... Luckily XMPP arrived and Jabber became the open alternative, but still all of this time irc stayed

Then twitter came and us Open Source peeps are obviously denting via identi.ca But while Twitter / Identica are nothing more than todays version of Instant Messaging only in broadcast rather than multicast mode irc still stays the best way to discuss.

And irc starts to become more and more active again There are lot of regular project channels and now there is #devopsdays , ##infra-talk and different other channels that are being much more frequented than before again ...

You might wanna join us again on irc.freenode.net that is :)

PS. And whatever they tell you .... Wave is not usable for online meetings ;)

And don't even get me started about Buzz

Jun 15 2009

Twitter Woes

This one has been sitting in the drafts for too long, but frankly there's not much I have to add.
Twitter is acting weird , we all know that .. but the following movie really beats everything.

Yes that's right what you are seeing is me logging into my twitter account, checking my @krisbuytaert
messages and seeing the @vti messages and then even taking full control of their (in the mean while deleted) account.

I used Istanbul to record the session and realized later that I should have done it in a better quality, however I didn't want to do the "hack" again :)

Anyone got an explanation for this ? Obviously I've sent the VTI people a mail so they are informed of this hickup.

Mar 23 2009

Identi.ca

Alexandre urges us too microblog on Identica rather than on Twitter

As an opensource evangelist I probably should do so .. Crossposting from Identi.ca to Twitter works... but there is one big thing that's blocking me to do this by default and that's a bug in microblog-purple which currently blocks me from using Identi.ca in Pidgin. Which is what I use to Tweet ..

As afteral .. Twitter is nothing more than world wide searchable irc , isn't it ? And I want them all from 1 interface, irc, jabber, twitter, ...

I`m also wondering about how to mix following people on Twitter ,and replying to them via Laconi.ca and the fact that I`ll still need to have follow twitter feeds..

Jan 15 2009

Drupal Twitter module

As I don't really use twitter apart to microblog but rather as an Instatn Messaging tool (why those people don't use IRC or Jabber remains a mistery to me wheel.reinvent :( )

I figured I could abuse it to announce posts on my blog, lots of people seem to be doing this so there had to be an easy way to auto publish them ..

The wonderful Drupal community seemed to have the same idea and therefore created the Twitter Module

A big fat warning however when you start using it.
The default values the module proposes for a tweet is :

New post: !title (!url)

Which results in something tinyurl doesn't really translate well..
(As you can see in this tweet)

So remove the brackets , or have some broken links to deal with :)

Jan 05 2009

Everything is a funky Twitter problem ..

When your favourite ex yahoo employee and mysql guru blogs about a "dns problem" and how he solved it using Twitter you can only smile ;) At last some useful use for Twitter .. when it's up at least ..

Sep 10 2008

Innovation in Startups

I`m absolutely astonished when I see some of the ideas / concepts people are trying to build a busness around , call it a cool startup and expect VC capital.

But I`m even more suprised that a big part of the world and even the VC world is falling for these ideas, or thinks that the general public will pay for such a product or service.

Let's have a look at some TechCrunch 50 startups.

Michael blogs about OtherInbox, when looking at their site my first reaction was: Hasn't google been doing that for ages ?
The ivo.rentoren+spamfromblog@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+cocacola@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+chanel@gmail.com type of addresses ?

On which you can base filters etc ? So what's new ? From reading their website I fail to see where they are differentiating.

2 articles down the road I learn from Brady that a company called Yammer which provides a hosted version of Twitter is also launching at TechCrunch... Now the idea of an enterprise Twitter version isn't stupid, but with a tool like Laconi.ca already available in open source it is something everybody with a functional brain can implement in his own company. Question arises obviously if Twitter itselve shouldn't host this :)

Yammer seems to be a spinoff of a much more interresting tool that I'm actually using Geni now that was/is a groundbreaking and interresting tool to use for which I haven't found an equally strong alternative.

Having had a couple of ideas before where I usually killed the potential project after thinking about the business model I wonder if I just should have pursued the projects even though I myselve would never become a customer at such a company.

We belgian people tend to be to critical for ourselves it seems, we think a project can't succeed to fast, so maybe we should start more stupid ideas and see how the rest of the world react. Afterall.. Reinventing the wheel seems to be a popular hobby of a lot of people these days

Jul 02 2008

LinkedIct

Tom , when can we expect LinkedIct ? :)

Feb 25 2008

Open Source & Twitter

Last friday at the Fosdem Beer event Ywein asked me ..
hmm.. there is nobody Twittering around here. Nothing really strange. I haven't seen anyone twittering at an Open Source event yet. At the place where probably the highest percentage of open source geek/m2 was measured we didn't see anyone twittering.

So when The 451Group announced they just launched The Pulse of Open Source I wonder .. what's the use. Do we really care about people sleeping in late, or having forgotten their powercords ? So nope.. not subscribing to that feed... I don't think the core of the open source community is going to jump on twitter anytime soon ..

Sorry Raven, but I won't be subscribing to that feed any time soon..