jessestay, Author at Stay N Alive - Page 51 of 105

Author: jessestay

Twitter Suspending Accounts in Droves

Posted on by jessestay

twitter fail whaleTwitter 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!

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=suspended&embed=1

Making WWW::Facebook::API Facebook Connect Ready

Posted on by jessestay

FacebookI’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.