Month: August 2009

The Tweet stuff: When it absolutely positively has to get there

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 8, 2009

If we’ve learned one thing from this week’s massive attack against the very fabric of our social connectivity, it’s that clouds don’t make the best stuff on which to build.

Twitter, in particular, has shown how very vulnerable it is—a vulnerability we share as we become more dependent on Twitter for most of our communication with each other. Oddly enough, I needed to contact someone about a business opportunity just as Twitter universe began to crumble, but all I had was her Twitter name—I couldn’t find her email address. Since Twitter was down, I couldn’t connect up with her for hours.

Of course, massive DDoS isn’t all that common, but Twitter still hasn’t recovered from the attack. As I’ve been playing with new Twitter accounts this week, I found varying degrees of responsiveness across the accounts, probably based on how busy they are; possibly based on how many followers a person has. None of the accounts would allow me to change most profile information, including the design. As you can see with my new integrated @shelleypowers Twitter account, I haven’t been able to change the picture, or to delete or add a new background image. I’ve had varying success with just posting a new message.

I have never liked centralized systems, though I understand their appeal and worth. It always seems, though, that just when you start to depend on the centralized service something happens to it.

Yahoo is now out of the search engine business, and with its new business partnership with Microsoft, its side applications like delicious are now vulnerable. I’ve managed to replace delicious with Scuttle, though I no longer have the social aspect of delicious. However, my Scuttle implementation does an excellent job with bookmarks, which is what I needed.

Then NewsGator sent an email around this last week telling all of us that our NewsGator feed aggregator is being replaced by Google Reader. I don’t like Google Reader. More importantly, I really don’t want to give Google yet more information about me. So, I replaced my NewsGator/NetNewsWire installation with a Gregarius implementation. It took me some time to get used to the new user interface, and I’ve had to password protect the installation, but I’m not dependent on a centralized feed aggregator, which can, and did, go away.

Twitter, though. I was not a big Twitter fan at first, but I can see the benefits of the application, especially if you want to point out an article or something else to folks, and have it quickly, virally spread, in a nice swine flu-like manner. It’s fun to have a giggle with folks, too. But the darn thing is centralized, and not only centralized, vulnerable and centralized, which gives one pause.

I have an Identi.ca account, too, but most folks are in Twitter. You can integrate the two by linking your identi.ca account to Twitter, as I have. Still, identi.ca is also centralized, just located in a different slice of the internet pie.

I finally bit the dust this week, and installed my own version of Laconica which is the microblogging software used with identi.ca. There were a couple of glitches, not the least of which were two very minor programming typos in the install program (yes, I have turned these in to the developers and it should be fixed, soon). However, the application is actually quite easy to use. I’ve had fun playing around with a new theme.

Just like identi.ca, you can connect an individual Laconica account up with Twitter, but doing so would cut my identi.ca account out of the picture. Beyond just the identi.ca issue, I also want to be able to display a list of links in my burningbird.net sidebar, with expanded URLs, so folks get search engine mojo. I could aggregate tweets, but you end up with shortened URLs, not expanded URLs when you go from tweet to sidebar. Besides, a sidebar link and a tweet are not the same thing, with the same structure.

I finally created my own tweet workflow, as I like to call it.

First, I installed Laconica, created a single user account (at this time), and then disabled registration. I don’t want to run a Twitter alternative.
Next, I found software, RSSdent, which will take an RSS feed and submit the items as tweets to identi.ca/Laconica. What I did was modify the application to submit the body of the feed without a link to the feed. The reason I don’t want the URL is that the feed I’m syndicating is my newly created Laconica installation. The body of the items will have the links that matter. Since I didn’t need any URL shortening (happening sooner in the process), I was able to trim much of the code, leaving a nice simple little application.
I set up a cron job so that items posted to my individual Laconica account will get posted to my identi.ca account every hour.
I connected my identi.ca account to my main Twitter account, at @shelleypowers. Now, when an item is posted in my identi.ca account, it gets posted to Twitter.
I can individually post in my Laconica account, but I also want to capture the links for my main Drupal installation, at Burningbird. There is a Drupal Twitter module, which works with identi.ca (by using indenti.ca/api as the alternative URL), or a Laconica account (in my case, using laconica.burningbird.net/api/). The only problem, though, is that this module is used to post a status update reflecting a new weblog post, not an interesting link. It gives you options to post the title, post link, and/or author, but not the body.
To work around the problem, I created a new content type, linkstory, with a custom content field (via CCK) that contains the link of interest and it’s link text. When I create a new linkstory, the body contains the tweet text and the expanded or shortened URL (depending on how long the URL is), but the CCK field contains the expanded link and the text I want for the link text.
I then created a view to display the content field text and URL, but not the body, or title of the posting.
I copied the Twitter module and did a small tweak (tweak, twitter, tweet — my head just blowed up) so that it outputs the body of the post, when I provided the !body label.
When a new linkstory is posted, the full link and link text get put into the sidebar, while the post body, containing the possibly shorted URL and any message get posted to my Laconica account.

The full workflow is: create a new linkstory or regular post in Drupal, which gets posted to my Laconica account via my modified Twitter module. Once a hour, these postings are picked up by rssdent, and posted to identi.ca. Posting on identi.ca automatically posts to my Twitter account.

If Twitter goes offline, the posts still get made to identi.ca. If identi.ca goes offline, the post is still made to my Laconica account, and the fully expanded URL for the link is posted to my main web site. My rssdent application keeps trying, once an hour, to post to identi.ca, and hence to Twitter. My modification to the Twitter Drupal module was an addition, so I can tweet posts and links, alike.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it was only about a day’s fun playing around. I plan on submitting my small Twitter Drupal module tweak as a patch, and hopefully it will be accepted. It only adds new functionality at the cost of one line of code. I’ll check in my fork of rssdent, but I need to figure out how github works. The Laconica installation didn’t require any modification, once I made the code corrections. These corrections should be incorporated into the original application, hopefully soon.

Now, this isn’t spamming. Everything gets posted to one place, though if people are subscribed to my Twitter and identi.ca accounts (or even my Laconica account), they’ll get an echo effect. This is just me grabbing hold of a little independence, while still partying with the communes. Setting my Bird free.

update I’m still getting familiar with the Twitter/Laconica API, but received a message via my identi.ca account from csarven about remote subscriptions. I can subscribe to identi.ca folks, as well as other Laconica sites, using the REST API. For a Laconica site, attach “?action=remoteSubscribe” to the URL, and you’ll get a page to enter the nickname of the person to whom you want to subscribe (at that site), and your remote profile, such as http://laconica.burningbird.net/shelleypowers. Or if you’re not logged into the system, just clicking the subscribe button next to the person’s avatar will open the Remote subscription page, automatically.

Once you enter the remote subscription request, you’re then taken back to your own site, where you have to accept the request. This prevents spamming. Once accepted, when you access your Home location, the postings from your remote friends will show up, in addition to postings from your friends who are local. You can also reply to the individual.

This functionality is also available for Twitter, built-in, but on my system, trying to use it caused errors. This is a known bug and a fix is currently being developed.

This is truly distributed, and decentralized, connectivity. You can’t take a system like this down, no more than you can take all email down, or all weblogs down. Way of the future.

Now, I must find out what other goodies are in the API…

Social Media

The Tweet stuff

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 8, 2009

From RealTech The Tweet Stuff: When it absolutely, positively has to get there:

If we’ve learned one thing from this week’s massive attack against the very fabric of our social connectivity, it’s that clouds don’t make the best stuff on which to build.

Twitter, in particular, has shown how very vulnerable it is—a vulnerability we share as we become more dependent on Twitter for most of our communication with each other. Oddly enough, I needed to contact someone about a business opportunity just as Twitter universe began to crumble, but all I had was her Twitter name—I couldn’t find her email address. Since Twitter was down, I couldn’t connect up with her for hours.

I spent a happy day playing with code today. The end result is a new “tweet workflow” that could possibly survive the year 2012.

update I’m still getting familiar with the Twitter/Laconica API, but received a message via my identi.ca account from csarven about remote subscriptions. I can subscribe to identi.ca folks, as well as other Laconica sites, using the REST API. For a Laconica site, attach “?action=remoteSubscribe” to the URL, and you’ll get a page to enter the nickname of the person to whom you want to subscribe (at that site), and your remote profile, such as http://laconica.burningbird.net/shelleypowers. Or if you’re not logged into the system, just clicking the subscribe button will open the Remote subscription page, automatically.

This functionality is also available for Twitter, built-in, but on my system, trying to use it caused errors. This is a known bug and a fix is currently being developed.

This is truly distributed, and decentralized, connectivity. You can’t take a system like this down, no more than you can take all email down, or all weblogs down. Way of the future.

Now, I must find out what other goodies are in the API…

People Specs

I lock my door at night

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 4, 2009

I’m not sure why the WhatWG folks thought that keeping an open door to the Twitter @whatwg account on the front page of their web site is a good idea, but it’s been interesting watching the *updates. Most are pretty juvenile, but there’s been some interesting snark along the way. Mostly, the posts have been by people asking why the WhatWG thought this was a good idea, as WhatWG followers are dropping like flies, tired of being spammed.

Interesting, too, that the WhatWG members are posting on the WhatWG IRC that the openness of the Twitter account was by decision, not by accident. Bragging about it, actually. After all, only a few spam messages will get through. Of course, that was before someone posted a note to the WhatWG IRC about the openness, making people aware of the capability. Once the open door was found, that’s all she wrote. The only thing keeping some control on the postings is the Twitter API limits.

To me, deciding to keep the door open to the WhatWG Twitter account highlights some of the problems we’ve had with the WhatWG folks in regards to HTML5: they see the world as this perfect utopia, where everyone follows the rules. If people don’t follow the rules, then the rules must be changed, because obviously, there’s something wrong with the rules.

Case in point: the table summary attribute isn’t being used correctly, not because people make mistakes, but because it’s bad and has to be removed, before someone gets hurt! Of course, those who advocate for its removal totally disregard that the bad summary attributes are attached to equally bad HTML table uses, too. But that’s not the point!

RDFa is too hard for people to use, and must be replaced by microdata. Why? Because Google make an RDFa error when it rolled out its support recently. But, it wasn’t a Google mistake, according to Ian Hickson, it was something inherently wrong with RDFa. Google quickly corrected its mistake error, but by that time, the damage was done: RDFa was shown to be a flawed system that needed to be replaced by something better. Why? Because people don’t make mistakes.

The same as people won’t spam an open Twitter account.

And now the folks on the WhatWG IRC are discussing the fact that those posting spammish messages to the WhatWG twitter account don’t understand the consequences of their actions. As jgraham wrote:

Lachy: I know that you can take some measures to cover your tracks, but in practice many people don’t bother and find that actions that they took believing that they would be free of consequences are not actually as anonymous and as free of consequences as they had assumed

In other words, never doubt your own judgment, when you can safely and easily find a way to dump any responsibility of your decisions on someone else.

The thing is, people learn from mistakes. A neighbor gets robbed, and we learn to lock our doors at night. People make mistakes with the summary attribute, or with RDFa, or any web technology, and we learn to provide better documentation. We are capable of learning from our past mistakes, learning, and doing a better job. We even learn to shut down that open door way to a Twitter account when it’s getting spammed.

There is no such thing as the perfect utopia where things can be made in such a way that no one is capable of making a mistake. All we can do is learn from the past, and do better in the future.

*Oh, and by the way? That “summary rules!” post was mine.

update

Evidently the WhatWG folks have finally realized that maybe an open door is a problem. Don’t expect an apology or acknowledgement, though:

factoryjoe: well, ok. some acknowledge might help people feel better that no more spam is forthcoming
Hixie: i expect that no more spam being forthcoming will make people feel better than spam telling them that no more spam is forthcoming

Tags WhatWG

Burningbird

Who are these strange people

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 4, 2009

A favorite writer of mine is James Fallows at The Atlantic. He doesn’t have comments, but when I’ve sent him emails in the past, he always responds as quickly as he can, and in detail. He’s also been known to republish email comments, with permission, on his weblog—ensuring exposure to both new people and new ideas.

James has shown that one can be part of a community, without having comments.

I have been inundated with spam comments at this site, and now I’m getting spam replies and follows on Twitter. I am, at least for now, turning off comments. I am also, seriously, thinking of deleting my Twitter account, unless Twitter can find some way to control what is becoming an increasing, and even overwhelming, problem.

My warmest thanks to all who have taken the time to comment here and at my other sites. I value your friendship, your words, and your time. I hope that you’ll still email me, if for no other reason than to say hello, how’s it going.