I wonder how many bird species will become extinct before @_everybird_ has the chance to tweet about them.

Twitter observation: shared, known bounds allow for the communication of infinity

#idea for a twitter bot: snarky sarcastic favstar

“Looks like 5 people ★ed your tweet. That’s, like, the most anyone’s ever ★ed one of your tweets. IT’S DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY FROM HERE”

“Congratulations on your 10★ tweet. Bet you feel real big about that”

“Your tweet got to 15★! Here’s an alternate version of your profile photo with a medal on.”

“20★ for a tweet with that many spelling mistakes? You people are idiots”

“Congratulations, you got to 50★! Get to 100★ and I may decide not to kill this adorable puppy”

“100 PEOPLE CLICKED A ★ SHAPED BUTTON AND NOW I AM REMINDING YOU OF THAT FACT”

“Congratulations, your 250★ tweet has inflated your ego sufficiently to enter the upper atmosphere!”

“500★? How much did that cost you?”

“Who do you think you are with your 1000★ tweet, Obama?”

“1,000,000,000★ are there even enough people in the world for that to be a thing”

Looks like twitter no longer demands that replies start with the @-name of the person they’re directed to, e.g. https://twitter.com/BarnabyWalters/status/435030572860465152

This makes @t-style reply-to-self as continuations of notes even more feasible as a practise.

#indieweb goal: by 2014-01-01, no longer be using twitter.com to read+reply to my friends’ content.

It’s already possible to use web action toolbelt to add indieweb reply/bookmark buttons to twitter.com and weave to expand POSSEd copies into full posts, but I think that’s as far as the “progressively enhance the twitter UI for indieweb support” train goes. Remaining pain points:

• Ads and other UI noise
• Lack of good search
• Lack of control over timeline — lists, following and blocking are the only ways to control what you see
• Very weird in-timeline threaded conversation view

Pieces in place allowing a seamless transition from using twitter.com:

• A whole bunch of indiewebcampers publishing their notes+articles on their own sites using microformats2
• An open source microformats2 parser
• App.net mark up notes with microformats2 h-entry and h-card
• h-card and xfn for follow lists, e.g. my contact list
• Shim to parse twitter.com into microformats2 data
• twitter-activitystreams to consume personal twitter feed as microformats2

Pain points still to be resolved:

• How to fall back to subscribing to someone’s twitter feed if they don’t publish their notes on their own site?
• Whether or not to support ATOM+RSS — sure there’s a lot of it around, but it’s a nightmare, and I don’t want to encourage publishing invisible DRY-violating data. Perhaps superfeedr’s normalisation will be of use
• What to do about all the wordpress blogs around with half-baked microformats support — auto-detect and use their ATOM feed? Try to find a related twitter account?

A good Wondermark strip on #hashtags, Twitter and marketing:

I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha that question.

Weave: get the full #indieweb story seamlessly on twitter.com.

A cross-browser add-on which expands truncated POSSE tweet copies of indieweb content in the Twitter UI.

Install now for Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome.

Laughing at the @twitter docs using “t.co” and “best practices” in the same sentence: dev.twitter.com/docs/tco-url-wrapper/best-practices

Just got an all-new type of email spam from @twitter — notifications that a tweet I was mentioned in was favourited :/ /cc Tantek Çelik

Battle for the planet of the APIs by Jeremy Keith — nice piece of writing, it’s worth pointing out that Twitter still includes rel=me links back to homepages, but is increasingly wrapping them with t.co, making them fairly useless.

Whilst I admire RSS as a rallying cry for the openness of data on the web, I don’t like it much, mainly due to it’s DRY violation. microformats2 is the better solution.

I have not stopped laughing at KimKierkegaard’s tweets all morning.

/via Crispin Walker #pseudophilosophy #twitter

Turns out the #microformats 2 JSON structures enable safe entity expansion just like twitter entities.

In my reply contexts I am not wanting to embed 3rd party HTML in my site, so I take the p-summary and strip tags. But, I want embedded h-cards to be expanded just like at-mentions on twitter. Pseudocode:

let h-card = canonical JSON structure for a note, with .summary as a plaintext representation of the content;

for item in h-card.children:
 if not in_array('h-card', item.type) continue;
 let html = HTML representation of the child from properties.url, name, etc;
 replace item.value in h-card.summary with html

Example here.

Twitter’s “you only see replies from people you follow if you also follow the target of the reply” model is quite fascinating because it means that, within a particular community, the number of tweets you see is not directly proportional to the number of people you follow. It’s probably square or cubic, perhaps I’ll model it and see.

Poll: Have any of you ever used twitter.com’s “Email this tweet” action (in ••• More, above Embed Tweet for some reason)? #webactions