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Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!

reclaim

The BarCampMadison folks are gearing up for August 28, 2010, and they’ve got something called Google Moderator in place to gauge interest in topics. I’d never heard of Google Moderator, but you see, I’m learning already… way to go BarCamp!

I’ve proposed a session titled “Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!” (You can vote on it if you like.) The idea is such… We spend a lot of time putting out data into other people’s streams, be it Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Delicious, Last.fm, and on and on… Our input makes these sites exist, and really, what would they be without us, the users, the contributors, the lifeblood of these sites.

Call it “user generated content” or “Social Media” or whatever… The fact is, you are probably creating content and giving it to others. Does that data still belong to you once you post it on those sites? Do you have the rights to it? How do you get it back? That’s the topic… That’s the problem… I have a few solutions, but I’m guessing others do as well.

That’s my idea…. What do you think?

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Tweet Nest: Archive Your Tweets

I’ve had a renewed interest in my data lately, and that’s manifested itself in making sure I’ve got copies of my data. Those bits and pieces we so easily create on other web site? I want them. I want them “here”, where here is under my own control, on my own site, my own server, not just living in the cloud somewhere, at the whim of some 3rd party.

Twitter - Since Sept 2006 See, I’ve been using Twitter for a long time… since September 2006 supposedly. I’d love to go back and see what my first dozen tweets look like, but Twitter doesn’t allow that. I’ve been kicking myself for not saving all of that data since the beginning, but with micro-content you tend to think that a. It’s tiny, so it doesn’t matter, and b. It’ll always be there. We’ve learned (time and time again) that this isn’t the case.

About 2 years ago I was doing some Drupal work and set up an aggregator to ingest my Twitter feed, which managed to back up a large portion of my tweets, but not all of them. It was more experimenting with Drupal than trying to create a good backup. Still, I was slightly happier knowing I had some sort of archive. I still wanted something that would display my own content (tweets) on my own site.

I then found Tweet Nest. Developed by Andy Graulund (@graulund) it’s a simple open source PHP/MySQL application that does just what I wanted. It grabs your tweets from Twitter using the API, and stores and displays them on your own site. Perfect!

Tweet Nest : @raster The install was pretty painless, and I actually spent more time customizing the CSS (and I’m still not happy with what I came up with.) Of course two days after I installed it, it appeared to stop working. But alas, no worries, it was just a “rate limit freakout” with the Twitter API. After that, things have been smooth.

Tweet Nest also did a great job of grabbing all of my tweets as far back as October 2009. Not quite back to September 2006, but I’m starting to think that will never happen. But, I did manage to get tweets as far back as March 2008, thanks to another service called Backupify. Now I’ve got to find a good way to load the data into Tweet Nest, and I’ll have most (but not all) of my tweets stored on my own site.

You can find my archived tweets at rasterweb.net/micro, and just like my recent Delicious/Scuttle/bookmarks exploration, I now feel that much better about my data. (But I’m not stopping there. The next project may take quite a bit more hacking on my part, but it’s another one that’s long overdue.)

So go check out Tweet Nest if you want an application on your own server, or Backupify if you just want a nice, secure backup.

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Twitter Kiosk Hacking

The year was 2007. Twitter was still fairly young, and was used by mostly the techie crowd. For BarCampMilwaukee2 I put together a bit of code using Perl, cron, HTML/CSS and ended up with this kiosk-sort of thing that we projected on the wall during the event.

tk000oldapp

Here’s a mock-up of what it looked like. I had just started testing it around August 2007 using the @web414 account on Twitter. Oh, keep in mind that there were some apps do to this sort of thing back then, but most were written in Flash, or AIR or something else that required specific hardware/software that I couldn’t use for whatever reason. Oh, and just a bit of history, I’ve been building kiosks out of old machines since 2002 or so. These are machines that would find no other use, so I do my best to put them to good use.

So for this particular modern-day kiosk experiment, I wanted to use the Eee PC 701 I got in 2007. It’s not my main portable since I got a MacBook, but I still find uses for it. The idea was to have it sit on my desk with a constant stream of Tweets rolling by…

tk001tweetdeck

I’m (currently) running EasyPeasy on the Eee PC, and it can run Adobe AIR apps, so I figured I’d give TweetDeck a try. Sure it’s in beta, but what isn’t, eh? Anyway, while TweetDeck is a nice app, it’s infuriating that it can’t display one really wide column. I know it’s infuriating because it’s a feature people seem to ask for in the support forums. TweetDeck wasn’t doing it for me.

tk002spaz

Next up was Spaz. I really like all the ideas behind Spaz, it’s a nice little application. You can even edit the CSS to tweak the interface. That’s a handy feature!

tk003spaz

I didn’t do much with the CSS tweaking, as I just wasn’t feeling it with Spaz. There was a lot of application UI to deal with, and I didn’t feel like tweaking an AIR app that much. Still, Spaz is nice for what it does. The developer’s blog has some Twitter gripes, but then, who doesn’t!?

tk004buzzbird

Next up was Buzzbird, an XULRunner-based application. If you’ve never hear of XULRunner, it’s basically a method of building applications the same way Firefox and Thunderbird are built, using XUL to create the interface. This is a technology I really wish we would have seen take off a bit more, as it’s great to work with.

tk005buzzbird

Giving the CSS a tweak in Buzzbird was simple. Inside the Buzzbird folder (under Linux) is a chrome folder, and in there is a skin folder, and in there is a classic folder. CSS and images live there.

tk006buzzbird

If you’re using a Mac, you just do the right-click ‘Show Package Contents’ trick and drill down a little bit. Also, if you are using Mac OS X 10.6 Buzzbird does not work (as of my writing this) though it does work on Mac OS X 10.5.

Buzzbird is a nice XULRunner-based application that is multi-platform and open source. The development seems pretty active on it as well. (And just like Spaz, the developer has some Twitter gripes…)

tk007firefox

Next up was… Firefox. I happen to really like Firefox, and one feature I really like is that (on Linux) it has a “kiosk mode” that let’s you hit F11 and it makes all the browser chrome go away, and leaves you with a full-screen view of your browser viewport – no controls – just content. I love that! Especially on the small screen of the Eee PC, which shows just 800×600 resolution. But this isn’t the normal Twitter view, and the normal Twitter view also doesn’t automagically refresh itself, so there’s work to be done. (Note: I finally did find a kiosk extension for Mac OS X, it’s Full Fullscreen.)

tk009addons

First off, we need the page to reload. Believe me, I dug through all sorts of Greasemonkey user scripts claiming to make a page reload, or specifically claiming to make Twitter reload. None of them worked. Maybe they used to, but they didn’t for me. What finally did work was an extension called ReloadEvery. It worked when nothing else would. (Be nice and don’t make it reload too often, remember, every page load uses someone’s resources.)

tk010stylish

So besides ReloadEvery we’ve also got Stylish installed, which lets us easily tweak the CSS for any web site. It’s pretty simple. So after just a little bit of CSS hacking (and I mean a little, I really didn’t spend much time on it) we’ve got a look that minimizes some of the stuff we don’t want to see, and emphasizes more of what we do want to see.

Here’s the CSS for “Twitter Kiosk” I put into Stylish.

/* Twitter Kiosk */

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("twitter.com") {

#logo { display: none !important; }
#status_update_box { display: none !important; }
#header { margin-top: -16px !important; }
#heading { display: none !important; }
#side_base { display: none !important; }
#container { width: 100% !important; }
.subpage { width: 100% !important; }
#timeline { width: 100% !important; }
.status-body { width: 93% !important; }

tk008firefox

It’s not perfect. As you can see the page is still showing the notification of new tweets, and some of the links at the top. I didn’t bother trying to get rid of those bits, but it should be pretty trivial to hide them as well.

tk011eeepc

Anyway, this thing is ready to run, and can just exist on the Eee PC sitting on my desk, or be connected via VGA to a larger external monitor, projector, or television. And best of all, it works in Firefox, which is everywhere, and requires just two extensions, and a little bit of CSS.

So the big question is, can I run it on older hardware with older software? ReloadEvery claims to work as far back as Firefox 1.5, though Stylish claims to requires Firefox 3.0 or higher. Full Fullscreen (for your Mac kiosk) has older versions that should work with older Firefoxes. Firefox 3.x says it needs Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, so that tosses out a lot of older Macs unless you look at Firefox 2.x or older. Still, you can experiment if you wish and see what you can cobble together. Who knows, I just might do that myself. (Maybe even on Linux.)

No matter what you do, have fun and keep on hacking…

Note: This was all written before #newtwitter happened, so I’m not sure any of it will still work. If it does, let me know… thanks!

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Twitter Apps Reviewed

There are a lot of choices in Twitter apps for the iPhone (and now the iPad) but how do you choose which one you should use?

Obviously there is one criteria that is most important when looking at Twitter clients… Which one has the cutest icon?

Twitterrific Twitteriffic: I’m not a fan of birds, but the name “Twitter” and “tweet” and what not, it’s part of the Twitter brand, so it makes sense. This icon is probably cute if you like birds, but as I said, I don’t like birds.


Twitter Twitter for iPhone: This is the “official” Twitter client, and it’s not very cute. Another stupid bird. I’m not a fan of birds. Couldn’t they make a cute bird instead of this goofy silhouette bird?


Twittelator Twittelator: OK, this isn’t even a bird, it’s an egg! How is an egg cute? I guess if you don’t like birds (like I don’t like birds) then maybe Twittelator would be cute. Well, cuter than a bird anyway. (Though it appears to be a bird egg, so maybe it will be a bird someday.)


TwitBird TwitBird: Another bird? And this is really the most uncute bird of them all. It’s worse that the “official” Twitter for iPhone bird. Who wants to look at this bird? Not me! (The bright orange sunburst is sort of nice though…)


EchoFon EchoFon: Finally, not a bird! It appears to be a word balloon type thing. I suppose that’s better than a bird, but as far as being cute, this is not cute. Unless you somehow think word balloons are cute. Plus, it’s just one word balloon, not two, so it’s not even a proper conversation, it’s just one person shouting.


Osfoora Osfoora: Like EchoFon, Osfoora has an uncute name, and an uncute icon. Not one, but two word balloons! If one isn’t cute, how are two going to be cute? At least it looks like a conversation, which is what Twitter can and should be, unlike the one EchoFon balloon that looks like just one person talking.


HootSuite HootSuite: Finally, a cute bird! It’s an owl, and I really like owls. I like when they turn their heads around and rip apart mice. Owls are cool. HootSuite has a cool looking owl. It’s a bird, but not a stupid bird like other apps have. Owls are the best birds.


Brizzly Brizzly: OMG! From what I can tell, this is a bear wearing a bird costume! How freakin’ cute is that!? I mean, bears are way cuter than birds, but this bear has stepped it up a notch by masquerading as a bird, but he’s not really a bird. The cute-o-meter is almost up to 11 on this one!


Seesmic Seesmic: Home Run! It’s a raccoon! I mean… Come on! How cute is that little raccoon!? He’s got big eyes, and he looks a little startled like maybe you scared him, and he’s wearing a mask, because he’s a raccoon!


Wow, things got exciting at the end, eh? I mean, a bear and a raccoon battling it out for the supreme titled of Best Twitter App (based on how cute the icon is.) It’s a tough decisions… Bear or raccoon? I really don’t think you can go wrong with either one.

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Interstate Music (Cascio)

Many, many years ago… when I played in bands, and all my friends played in bands, we’d go to a few different music stores… Lincoln Music was on the south side, and Record Head was a pawn shop where you could get a cheap guitar, but one of the coolest places was Cascio. It was huge, and they never seemed to mind that we’d want to play every instrument in the store.

Since I had to get a trumpet for my daughter recently, and I’ve been dissatisfied with a previous instrument rental with The White House of Music (which took over Beihoff Music) I ended up asking a question on Twitter:

Any recommendations for school band instrument rental? people tell me @interstatemusic is good... comments?

…and with a few people telling me Interstate was good, I went there… and I remembered how much I liked it!

And yes, Interstate Music is on Twitter, and I do follow them, and about a week ago, they held a little contest on Twitter, and I happened to win it. (Though I was worried @Pezzettino might beat me to it!) They let me know that I won a Josh Rouse CD, and when I talked to them on the phone, they also mentioned a gift card they would throw in. (Good way to get me into the store, eh?) When my package arrived, there was also an Archer hat in the box. Nice!

Josh Rouse CD / Archer Hat / Cascio Gift Card

This is a good lesson in how companies can use Twitter (or any social media) to interact with it’s customers, or potential customers. I know it may seem like a small and simple thing, but it’s a conversation instead of a broadcast, it’s a company getting involved in a dialog with people, and not just blatant promotion of a brand, which some companies tend to do. Striking a balance is the sweet spot.