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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Tweet Library and the Twitter Archive

TweetLibrary

TweetLibrary

Like many others, I got access to my Twitter archive last night.

The option, launched a few months ago, enables you to download a complete archive of all your tweets and retweets inside a .zip file that contains CSV and JS archives with a nice HTML page you can browse. With over 50,000 tweets since February 15, 2009, my .zip file weighed at around 9 MB. Seeing tweets from four years ago has a strange effect in that it shows the ephemeral nature of 140 character-long status updates in better context. In other words, I used to tweet “good morning” and “goodnight”; with time, I lost my good Twitter manners.

The Twitter archive was a feature I had been anticipating for quite a while. As you know, I have been a strong proponent of solutions to archive and search your Twitter account – such as Manton Reece’s Tweet Library, Cue (formerly Greplin), and CloudMagic. Prior to the rollout of the Twitter archive, all these solutions allowed you to search your most recent tweets (Cue and CloudMagic) or download the past 3200 (Tweet Library); none of them could, per Twitter’s API limit, access your entire Twitter history.

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Tweetbot for iPhone 2.6 Adds Custom POIs, Header Images→

Tweetbot for iPhone 2.6 Adds Custom POIs, Header Images

Tweetbot 2.6 is out today on the iPhone, and it’s a minor update from the previous 2.5 version. There are, however, two changes I would like to cover.

Tweetbot 2.6 comes with support for Twitter’s new header images for profiles. You’ll have to upload them directly from Twitter’s website – you can’t upload new ones in Tweetbot – but the app will display them nicely in user profiles, just like Tapbots’ other app, Netbot.

Tweetbot 2.6 also lets you create custom POIs for locations. If you think a location is incorrect, or simply would like to customize the location Tweetbot finds, click on the location in the compose screen, and create a custom POI. Be aware that other Tweetbot users will then be able to use the POI, as it’s based on Twitter’s geolocation features and the address of the location.

Tweetbot 2.6 is a minor, but nice update. Get it from the App Store.

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Use Twitter for iOS with App.net→

Use Twitter for iOS with App.net

Developed by Steve Streza, Apparchy is a proxy server that lets you use the official Twitter apps for iOS with App.net. Built for the App.net hackathon that took place yesterday, Apparchy provides a functional API that lets the official Twitter clients work with App.net. As Streza explains on his personal blog:

Today I shipped the first alpha of Apparchy, which turns Twitter’s official iOS apps into App.net clients. You sign up for a free account on apparchy.net, add your app.net account, and then log into the Twitter app with your Apparchy username and password. Then, the Twitter app will start loading data from app.net through the Apparchy API. You can view your stream, your mentions, your profile, your followers, and your friends, as well as post, reply, star, and repost. It’s not entirely complete, and some parts of the app will have no data or return nothing, but the core experience is pretty good.

I have set up Apparchy with my App.net account, and it works just as advertised. Some Twitter-related features and UI elements aren’t obviously compatible with App.net, but for the most part, Apparchy is indeed reliable as a Twitter=App.net bridge. There are some bugs, so use caution if you already rely on Twitter for iOS for your Twitter accounts.

If you, like me, don’t use Twitter for iOS but have it on your device, delete your existing accounts and set up Apparchy. I don’t like Twitter for iOS, but this is a cool experiment nevertheless.

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Convert Twitter.com URLs to Tweetbot Links

I communicate with my team through iMessage. We’ve tried many “communication services” over the years, yet, since last Fall, we’ve always come back to Apple’s solution. It’s not perfect for us, its reliability is far from 100%, but it works.

As we keep using iMessage every day, there’s one category of “media” we’re constantly sharing: Twitter URLs. We find some cool piece of information or news on Twitter, we share it with the team. Linking back to tweets has, in a way, become our favorite type of commentary for fun, news-hunting, and everything in between.

Twitter.com URLs, though, aren’t the best way to jump back to a tweet, especially when you’re on a mobile device. When you’re on a Mac, clicking on a Twitter link will open a new browser tab, which doesn’t really bother us as we’re used to opening background tabs on our computers. But on the iPhone and iPad, it can become annoying: there’s a limit of 8 Safari tabs on the iPhone, you get yanked out of Messages, and, most of the time, mobile.twitter.com URLs just don’t work. In our team chat, we’ve speculated the “Not Found” errors we’ve seen may be related to how Tweetbot generates Twitter URLs when you hit “Copy Link to Tweet”: instead of using status in the URL slug, it uses statuses, which seems to be the reason behind erroneous redirecting on mobile devices.

We’ve come to the conclusion that we want to be able to easily copy twitter.com URLs and turn them into links based on Tweetbot’s URL scheme. Using a simple tweetbot:// URL, you can use Twitter’s status ID – the same you receive when you copy a link – to open a single tweet directly in Tweetbot. And the best part is, the same URL scheme works consistently across Tweetbot for iOS and Tweetbot for Mac. As everyone on the MacStories team is already using Tweetbot, the solution seemed obvious – plus: no more browser tabs.

The problem was finding a way to convert twitter.com URLs easily, without having to remember complex combinations of keystrokes and commands. Furthermore, as I promised my team I’d come up with a way, I had to figure out a solution to do text conversion directly on iOS.

As a result, I’ve come up with an AppleScript, a Keyboard Maestro macro, and a simple Python script to transform Twitter URLs into their Tweetbot counterparts. Read more

Twitter Archiving Tool Watermark Gets Dropbox Export Feature

Recently relaunched under a new name, Manton Reece’s Watermark is one of my favorite web services. Seamlessly integrated with Twitter, Watermark is an archiving tool that, through filters and custom collections, lets you archive and search your entire timeline. From our previous coverage:

Tweet Marker Plus was one of my favorite services to provide the kind of Twitter functionalities that Twitter the company always ignored: powerful search and filtering tools, collections, and additional browsing options. Like Cue, Tweet Marker Plus has proven to be a worthy addition to my workflow to retrieve tweets and leverage the information shared on the platform every day.

I use Watermark on a daily basis to retrieve tweets that have been shared in my timeline – status updates that would be hard to retrieve using Twitter’s web interface, let alone the official apps. Twitter never invested in powerful archiving and filtering tools, and Watermark provides a fantastic backup solution to know that, in the background and automatically, your timeline will be archived and made searchable for the future. This is important for online data preservation, a subject I’ve been exploring for the past year.

Today’s update to Watermark introduces yet another option to make sure your data will always be with you: automatic Dropbox export. Available in Watermark’s settings, once authorized with Dropbox the service will create archives of filters, collections, and your own tweets as .csv files. For your tweets, the 10,000 most recent ones will be saved, whereas filters and collections are limited to 1,000 for now. As Manton writes on his personal blog:

Dropbox sync fixes that. Watermark can now automatically copy tweets (and App.net posts) from your saved filters and custom collections to CSV files on Dropbox. For example, search Watermark for “iPhone 5”, click “Save as filter”, and the most recent 1000 tweets matching that query will appear in a file called “iPhone_5.csv” on Dropbox. It keeps running in the background, so the files are updated every hour as new tweets matching the search are downloaded by Watermark, even if you aren’t signed in.

Like I said, I use Watermark every day, and being a Dropbox fan as well, it’s great to see the two services coming together. I feel like Dropbox is becoming, for many, the de-facto “filesystem for the web”, and it only makes sense for a service like Watermark, which aims at freeing data from the pressure of Twitter, to gain an export option based on it. Right now, tweets are saved in .csv files with their ID, author’s username, date, service (Twitter or App.net), message, and original URL. In a future version, I hope Manton will consider some kind of plain text export option as well, though that might be tricky; right now, I’m comfortable with the structure of .csv archives.

Watermark is a service I highly recommend, and it’s only $5 per month.

Favstar Redesigns→

Favstar Redesigns

Favstar is one of my favorite web services. Alongside Evernote, Simplenote, Cue, and Dropbox, it has become an essential part of my daily workflow. Today, Favstar has launched a major redesign that will surely come in handy in monitoring tweets from tomorrow’s Apple event.

Favstar works with Twitter. By default, it monitors the “faves” and retweets your tweets receive, by which users, and when. It then provides a clean interface to access these statistics, and, aside from “ego-boosting” purposes, it can actually be a great tool to see the kind of tweets and content your followers like and engage with the most. However, if you decide to unlock the Pro functionalities for $30 every six months, you’ll gain the option to give the “tweet of the day award”, see older tweets in your timeline, see retweet details, tweak your profile, get custom notifications, and a lot more. For me, it’s 30 bucks well spent on a service that has enabled to understand Twitter besides wasting time making fun of Samsung.

Matthew Panzarino has a good overview at The Next Web about today’s redesign:

The tweet view now lets you see the profile pics of those who have retweeted/fav’d you, which is standard, or provides you with a detailed analysis of the first 1k retweets of a tweet, with the account, its followers, a profile pic and text profile for reference. This can be cool as it shows which accounts are ‘first responders’ in retweeting you, allowing you to perhaps reciprocate with a follow of your own.

The old Favstar was feeling a little long in the tooth, and the new version looks great both in terms of design and features. The new Favstar offers more data and simpler navigation; the mobile website has been updated to a new design as well, sporting a panel-based layout that’s a terrific improvement over the old Favstar. I use Favstar’s mobile site every day through Tweetbot (double-tap on the Profile tab), and this is a welcome improvement that doesn’t sacrifice any functionality of the desktop site.

You can sign up for Favstar here.

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Send Favorite Tweets To OmniFocus’ Inbox

In my daily “social networking workflow”, I use the “favorite” feature of Twitter as a todo list of sorts. I couldn’t find a way to add favorites to OmniFocus without leveraging email as a bridge, so I built a solution myself.

Using IFTTT, a single line of bash, Hazel, and AppleScript, I created a simple way to turn a favorite tweet into an OmniFocus task in the application’s inbox, ready for future processing. As an extra, I have also created a more “advanced” version that adds Automator to the mix to only extract URLs from favorite tweets. Read more

Tweet Marker Plus Relaunches As Watermark, Adds Support For App.net

Manton Reece’s Tweet Marker Plus, a service to index Twitter and provide filtering and search tools, has been relaunched as Watermark. As explained by Reece in a post on his personal blog, the new name wants to reflect the “gradual move away from Twitter and syncing”. Initially launched as a free service, Tweet Marker has been integrated as a syncing solution in dozens of Twitter clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific. The Plus version, launched in April, built on the success of Tweet Marker to offer a web interface for Twitter timelines, fully indexed by day and searchable outside of the Twitter platform. I wrote:

The most visible feature of Plus, the web timeline, is very straightforward, but I believe it’ll prove to be a worthy addition for, say, those users who rely on iOS and Mac apps at home, but who are forced to stay on Windows environments at work. Tweet Marker’s web timeline can pick up from where you last left off on another connected client, and it’s got a “scroll to marker” option to manually load your last-seen tweet. On the timeline itself you can reply, retweet, mark as favorite and check out a tweet’s unique URL, but these actions will simply forward you to a dedicated page on Twitter.com. Tweet Marker’s Plus timeline isn’t meant to be a full-featured client: rather, it is a basic way to rely on your existing sync position if nothing else is available.

With the Watermark rebranding, Reece is gradually shifting away from Twitter following the controversy that has arisen in the past months in regards to the service’s API changest and relationship with third-party developers. Keeping the same infrastructure, monthly fee, and core functionalities, Watermark is a new “client and archive tool”, independent of the free Tweet Marker sync service, which will keep working as usual with Twitter apps that support it.

Watermark’s new focus on providing a platform that goes beyond Twitter is represented in this initial version by its support for App.net, Dalton Caldwell’s rising real-time communication service that costs $50 per year. Reece writes:

As part of the relaunch it immediately gains a new feature: App.net posts. You can now add an App.net account and it will download any posts from your friends, making them available for search. Watermark is already storing tens of millions of tweets, and I’m excited to start adding App.net posts to that archive as well.

While still heavily Twitter-based from an interface standpoint, the new Watermark sports an App.net option in the section on the right, where users can browse “all tweets”, favorites, and load past tweets by day with a calendar menu.

Clicking on App.net Posts in Watermark will open a web based timeline; right now, there are no further options available for App.net posts (the service only downloads posts from friends and adds them to the search archive) as App.net doesn’t even have an official search functionality yet. Manton says there’s still “plenty to improve” for App.net support, and that he’s also evaluating timeline position sync for App.net accounts – indeed one of the hallmark features of Tweet Marker.

Tweet Marker Plus was one of my favorite services to provide the kind of Twitter functionalities that Twitter the company always ignored: powerful search and filtering tools, collections, and additional browsing options. Like Cue, Tweet Marker Plus has proven to be a worthy addition to my workflow to retrieve tweets and leverage the information shared on the platform every day. As Twitter becomes more hostile towards third-party developers and apps that take data out of Twitter, it’s great to see Tweet Marker Plus expanding to new platforms. I find App.net very promising in its intent to sell an API as a product to its users, and Watermark can build on the success of Tweet Marker Plus to perfectly integrate with the service, free of the restrictions and “requirements” of Twitter.

Watermark is $5 per month.

The Rise Of Third Party Services And Fall Of Google In iOS

When Apple introduced iOS 6 to the world at this year’s WWDC, one of the most talked about moves was Apple’s decision to step away from their partnership with Google Maps and create their own maps app. In many respects, it wasn’t too surprising given the increasingly strenuous relationship between Apple and Google in the years since the iPhone launched and Google became a competitor with Android, but in recent weeks it was also revealed that YouTube will also no longer be included as a pre-installed app from iOS 6. That leaves Google Search as the only remaining Google service to be integrated into iOS. Yet whilst Apple has been severing its relationship with Google, it has been courting numerous other service providers and integrating them into iOS over the past few years.

Curious to visualise this information, I made a list of every notable service that has been integrated with iOS (and when) and then created the above graphic (click on it to view a larger version). When I had compiled the list, it was pretty compelling (and longer than I had realised), but I think the graphic takes it to the next level and really tells a story about iOS and Apple’s relationship with other services.

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