32Hours

Anyone have any input on the reputation of SocialText? Looks good, and they may be willing to host BeTwittered code as open source. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Robert

Sorry to everyone who is still using it, but BeTwittered will be going offline on March 20, 2010.

Sorry to take it down, it was a very fun project and it’s was really great getting feedback and hearing from people who use it.

Robert

My first iPhone app, TwitterTrak for the iPhone.  Do you want to keep track of what people on Twitter are up to from your iPhone?  I wrote this one first because it would be relatively simple, and because I wanted it for myself.

TwitterTrak will let you keep up on any topic, person, or keyword you choose.  Just set the search term, and it will gather the tweets for you.

Click here to go to TwitterTrak in the iTunes appStore:

Ideas for additional features?  Please leave comments and let me know.  I really want to hear what people want most, but keep in mind, TwitterTrak will always be a tracker and search tool first and foremost.

Thanks!

Robert

TwitterPing is something I put together for myself back when Twitter services were up and down a lot. I still find it pretty useful when it looks like Twitter is acting a bit slow or odd. It can give you a very clear picture of how quickly (or slowly!) Twitter is responding to third party clients and applications.

As with all of the gadgets and apps on 32Hours, please feel free to put them on any web page you like.

Thanks,
Robert

TwitterSearch will let you set a search term, and it will update every 60 seconds to let you know what is going on in the Twitter universe. You can simply put in a search word or term, or be a little more tricky.

Try setting one of these as your search:

• “#hashtag”  to track a topic of interest. I like to follow #ubuntu to see the latest topics on my favorite Linux distro. (NOTE: this now works in “search” and “locked_search” modes mentioned below)
• “@username”  to follow all mentions of someone. You could see what people are saying to @ev, or about him!
• “to:username”  You can see what people are saying ONLY to a specific person.
• “from:username”  You can track what a specific person is saying.

My favorite: Just enter a username without the “@” You’ll get to see the combo of what someone says, what is being said to them, and anything anyone says about them.

Add it to iGoogle.

The web page is at http://betwittered.com/twittersearch

Just like everything else I put up here, feel free to embed it anywhere you like.

(ADDED, 18 MARCH 09)
Would you like to personalize TwitterSearch to put in a web page or blog? You can change the default search to fit your site. Just add “?search=searchTerm” to the URL. For example: http://betwittered.com/twittersearch?search=from:metarobert Note that I used a slightly advanced search of “from:metarobert” If you want to get fancy, you’ll need to know how to URL encode things like spaces and special characters.

(ADDED, 15 SEPT 09)

UPDATE:  There is a new search option.  By adding the option “locked_search”  you can now set TwitterSearch to lock in to a specific search.  With this set, the text area and button will be hidden and the search will always be set to your prference.  This is perfect for using Twittersearch to display a site specific search as a gadget on your web site.  Adding it is as simple as using an URL like :

http://betwittered.com/twittersearch?locked_search=from:metarobert

If you are wanting to embed this in your own site, here is how I did it in this page:

<iframe
    src='http://betwittered.com/twittersearch'
    style='
        height:300px;
        width:400px;
        border:0px;
        margin-left:auto;
        margin-right:auto;'
>
</iframe>

To use the “search” or “locked_search” options, just change the ‘src=’ parameter.

Thanks,

Robert

BeTrendy is an interactive gadget that will keep you up to date with what is going on in the Twitter universe, right from your iGoogle home page. Who’s searching for what, and what are people Tweeting about? Move your cursor over BeTrendy to rotate the tags.

or you can always get directly to BeTrendy: http://betwittered.com/betrendy

Feel free to add BeTrendy (or BeTwittered!) to any web page you’d like. The code I used to add BeTrendy to this page, for an example, was to put in an iframe with the following attributes:

src="http://betwittered.com/betrendy" style="height: 250px; width: 350px; border:0px;"

Enjoy, and please let me know if you have any questions. Post a comment, or email me: robert@arlesnet.com

Released tonight, 11:30pm February 8th to me, BeTwittered gets a new search function. Look under the newly named “More!” tab and click “Search” Search for @usernames, funny words, whatever you like.
Have Fun,
Robert

Sorry for the down-time.  BeTwittered is back, again.  I notified the folks at Twitter as soon as I diagnosed the problem on Friday, January the 30th.  Being the second time this happened, it only took me a few minutes to diagnose and then notify Twitter.  There were some unfortunate delays, but I must say that today, @al3x apologized for the delay, got on top of the issue, and made sure that there was follow through.  Shortly after we chatted via email about the status this morning, there was obvious action.  It’s Alive!  @al3x really provided me (us!) with good customer service in the end.

The longer version of the story.

The reason for the down-time?  Twitter is pretty popular (you probably already know that!) and many people have written programs to do everything from act as a client (like BeTwittered) to attempt to read and process EVERY tweet that passes through Twitter. They then do all manner of data manipulations to provide info like who’s the most popular, the most chatty, who’s following who, where people chat from most often, etc.

Now, there are many ways to write a Twitter client. One, and the most common:  write a Windows/Mac/Linux application that runs on your PC.  We gleefully install these, and they run on our PC.  We send and receive Tweets, and they travel between our PC’s and the Twitter servers, directly.  That’s nice, but sometimes it’s nice to have another type of “no install” web based client.  This other type of Twitter client, like BeTwittered, is actually just a web page.  When we use BeTwittered, our tweets go directly between BeTwittered.com and Twitter.com.  The key thing to note here is that this is a SERIOUS flood of traffic, and it’s not spread out between all of our PC’s. There are tens of thousands of BeTwittered users, now (Much to my surprise, I must say.  I wrote BeTwittered because I thought it would be a nice thing to have, and I wanted to learn to write programs, especially web programs)

Now for a bit of conjecture mixed with a bit of my knowledge.  Twitter saw the huge amount of traffic being requested by BeTwittered.com and most certainly made an obvious assumption.  BeTwittered was being a rude Twitter citizen and just appeared to be trying to pull huge amounts of data for it’s own purposes.  If I were to design an app that was going to analyze large amounts of Twitter data, I would make an arrangement with the Twitter team and ask them how they’d like my server to “drink from the fire hose,” as it’s called.  My mistake was not realizing that the huge growth of BeTwittered had crossed a line at some point.  It started looking (and being?) a bit greedy and rude.   So they cut us off, not too surprising in hindsight.

I now know that they weren’t aware that BeTwittered was just aggregating the traffic of thousands of people.  I look back and understand that I didn’t actually make this clear after getting banned the first time.  This time, there was a bit of a “eureka!” moment when I communicated this properly.  Also complicating things a bit was a Twitter change of policy that happened between the 1st and 2nd “blacklisting”  They instituted a limit on hourly requests to the twitter servers, one that applies to high traffic generating servers like BeTwittered.com.  BeTwittered apparently burst through the gates like a track star and crossed that limit almost immediately.

When I get a chance, I’ll be looking much harder at caching more requests to Twitter.  I’m hoping to find ways of pruning any unnecessary requests that there might be. That’s a complicated business though, since I need to avoid meddling with legitimate requests… deceptively picky stuff to mess with.

I wonder now, about open vs closed systems.  Twitter is private and closed in the sense that it’s a private commercial business with openings only where they choose to allow them.  They are VERY open about sharing their data, though, as things stand today.  I must give them that.  The problem that looms large:  What happens, though, when lots of people depend on a closed service, and the terms of service suddenly change?  I’m not saying twitter would do this,  and to be fair, they didn’t even have to talk to me OR restore BeTwittered service.  But what if we depend on a communications system like Twitter and then the rug gets pulled out from beneath us?  Email is an example of an open system.  We don’t have to stick with our Internet provider to communicate with our friends.  You can be on AT&T and I can be on Comcast or even AOL (ick) and still send email back and forth.  There is, by the way,  identa.ca!  Like twitter, but open. We’d have to all move over there, though.  What’s twitter without our friends?  I’m digging a bit deep here, I admit.  We do need to keep an eye open for these things, though.

Oh, well, all better now.   Off with my tin-foil hat… and again, thanks Alex!  I appreciate the help again!

Robert
BTW – Sorry to anyone who was waiting on this explanation of the events.  I’d promised it after the first outage and just got into one of those places in life where I never seemed to get any time to do anything.

My Apologies. If it is something I can fix, I will. My guess is that BeTwittered has been blacklisted again for making too many requests of the Twitter servers. I’ve not yet gotten a response as to whether this is the case or not.

Update (2:24pm pacific time) : The problem should be fixed, but take some time to propagate on the Twitter servers.  If you want to see more detail, and my comments (which get a bit bi-polar, I might add) please click the comments link below.  I’ve had a rough day, and I’m going silent! unless things don’t get better as expected.

UPDATE (3:53pm Pacific time)  I let Alex at twitter know that we’re still not back online.  It should have been OK by now.   He’s going to nudge the ops team to get the to check it out.  BeTwittered *will* be back online, it’s just a matter of time now.  Hopefully not long.  I am out of town and not at a computer often, though I will check in regularly.

UPDATE: ((ra-2/2/2009 8:23 AM)  We’re still down, but I have continued to keep in contact with the Twitter team.  BeTwittered should be back soon.  I’m sorry to say I can’t say exactly when, but the operations team was apparently very busy working hard due to expected superbowl traffic.  Hopefully they’ll get to opening the gates for BeTwittered this morning. I also want to say I appreciate the supportive comments, especially since this is the second time BeTwittered was “banned”  recently.  Thank you all!  It shouldnt be long now.

Thanks,
Robert

I want to ensure that anyone getting the, somewhat snarky, “Twitter is not responding in a sane manner” message is not too alarmed.

It appears that Twitter, who’s servers were reportedly doubled for the U.S. Presidential inauguration, may already be having capacity problems today. The servers are responding slowly and a bit randomly. If you are using BeTwittered, please be aware that I am watching the betwittered.com server closely. If you are using BeTwittered-Canteen or BeTwittered-Identica, you are so far unaffected, although all three are hosted on the same server.

Thanks,
Robert

UPDATE / NOTE: I’ve found a bug today.  If you post and it fails, the error message is cleared by the timeline refresh that follows.  This means, simply, that if Twitter does not respond and accept your Tweet today, you do NOT get the right feedback from BeTwittered.  My apologies.  I will fix this so you get a “failed send” message in the future.

Robert