Month: July 2009
JesseStay – posted on 7/8/2009
Twitter Suspending Accounts in Droves
Twitter seems to be on a roll lately. It would seem, either by bug, or some new policy just implemented, Twitter has just suspended hundreds to thousands of Twitter accounts with little to no reason. You can see all the action, semi-real-time here.
I just received a tip from a good friend, a very strong Twitter user and definitely not a spammer, who was one of those people suspended without cause. She stated she submitted a ticket to Twitter support and the ticket was immediately closed with no reason. Looking over Twitter search, she’s not the only one, and many very valid accounts are complaining of having their Twitter accounts suspended out of the blue. Reasons for suspension are often following people and unfollowing people frequently, following people too fast, blatent spammy behavior, among other things, but based on the users I know were suspended none of these activities were happening.
There is no word from Twitter on this matter – I’ll update the post when I hear more. You can watch the suspensions and the horror occur in real-time (thanks to FriendFeed, ironically) below:
UPDATE: Twitter has responded via their Status blog: “Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts. We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.”
Other major accounts suspended: @marismith, @denisewakeman, @loubortone, @tweetlater, @deniseoberry, @radionational – if your account was affected please leave a comment!
Making WWW::Facebook::API Facebook Connect Ready
I’m going to get geeky on you here again. I’ve been working on a few things with SocialToo to enable Facebook Connect on the site – more on that to come. What I’ve been surprised by though is that this long after the launch of Facebook Connect the main Perl libraries for Facebook, WWW::Facebook::API, still do not support Facebook Connect. The main difference between making API calls from a native Facebook app and a third-party Facebook Connect app is that in the native app, you verify the signature via the URI parameters, via parameters that begin with “fb_sig_”. In Facebook Connect, those variables are set in Cookies by the Facebook Client-side Javascript libraries, and begin with your applications API key, so they’d start something like “(api key)_”, and come from the cookies instead of the URI. You can read more about that here.
So for full compatibility in your preferred Facebook API libraries, both the URI parameters have to be checked along with the Cookies in the event the developer is trying to connect from a third-party website. In the PHP libraries this is already done for you. Surprisingly, Perl has not yet implemented this.
So I got to work on it, and through a couple simple lines of code added to WWW::Facebook::API::Canvas I was able to make get_fb_params check your cookies when the URI parameters are not presence. I’ve submitted the patch to the library’s owner, Clayton Scott, but in case you want to integrate it sooner you can apply it to the 0.4.14 version of Canvas.pm by downloading this patch.
I hope you’re able to get as much out of this as I am – please let me know if you see any potential bugs with the changes.
Reason #552 to Be on FriendFeed: Real-Time Search
I’ve talked in the past about how I read your blogs. I rarely subscribe through Google Reader any more – I read all of your blogs through FriendFeed. Therefore if you want me to read your blog, I strongly suggest taking the first step of importing it into FriendFeed. Well, if that weren’t reason enough, FriendFeed just gave you even one more reason to import your blog and other social data into their site: real-time search.
If you’ll look down in the lower-right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see an example of it in action – every mention of “realtime”, “real time”, “social”, “friendfeed”, “twitter”, “facebook”, or “Jesse Stay” anywhere on the web, at any time that has been imported into FriendFeed now appears real-time, as it’s happening. Go ahead – change the search parameters to something like “earthquake”, or “iran”, or “michael jackson”. You’ll quickly see the value of having such real-time, on-demand search at your fingertips.
FriendFeed is said to be getting ready to also release notifications, probably in the same way they do your other friend lists and feeds via e-mail and IM for the various search terms you’re trying to find. As the terms come in real-time, you’ll receive them. This is powerful stuff!
Over a year ago Twitter had a similar feature – they called it “track”, which they’ve recently re-introduced to developers via their API. It was the main reason I joined and stuck with Twitter. As soon as their competition was dead they removed it. It looks as though FriendFeed has one-upped Twitter once again with this feature.
So if you haven’t already, go to FriendFeed, get an account, import all your Twitter and Facebook friends already on the service (you’ll find most of your active friends probably already are!), and start adding your blogs, Twitter feeds, facebook feeds, photos, videos, and more into your stream so they too can be indexed by this powerful search. The web just got a whole lot more real-time, and FriendFeed just got a whole lot more powerful.
Going on a Staycation
Photo Copyright Stay N’ Alive Productions, LLC
“Stay”cations in my family aren’t just for vacationing near home! This Tuesday, July 7, I’ll be packing up my stuff and heading on a road-trip with my family to Boston Massachusetts where my parents live to stay with them about a month. The goal is to visit with family, see my new nephew soon to be born any day now, my twin nieces in New Jersey, and just to get out of Utah for a short bit. Having lived overseas and out of state most of my life, I crave traveling so it will be a good trip.
While I’m out there I want to see you! Thus far my schedule’s wide open. On July 15 I’m told there will be a FriendFeed meetup (would that be called a Friend “Feed”?) at 5pm at the Cambridgeside Galleria Food Court. I’ll be there, and you can RSVP by commenting on this thread on Friendfeed. I’m also scheduled to meet a few SocialToo customers in New York, so I’ll probably take a trip out there while I’m visiting my Sister in New Jersey. If you’d like to meet up in Boston, New York, New Jersey, or wherever I can go in driving distance, please let me know and we’ll see if we can get together! I plan to be there until early August so we’ve got plenty of time to see one another (although I’m sure the time will fly!). Also, please let me know if I’m missing your conference or you need a good speaker while I’m out there!
In the meantime you can track me starting July 7 via the Twitter hashtag, #staycation – maybe I’ll make a FriendFeed room out of it or something. Plan on some great photos of Mount Rushmore, Niagra Falls, Chicago, and all the Boston and New York sites. I’m excited for what should be a very fun trip!
