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twitter bird in real life, originally uploaded by scott hampson.
In real life, would the twitter bird still be cool, or just really annoying?
I blogged about Twitter’s invalid search results in an early post titled Twitter Search gone mad!. Today I noticed the same thing again when I logged in to HashPakistan‘s control panel. There are lots of invalid tweets. e.g. look at the one below
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Well, my initial estimates were wrong. I thought I could retweet the posts and Twitter would give me accurate results. The problem is with twitter results. They are giving me wrong and irrelevant results.
Also, when I ask Twitter to only send me “positive” tweets, it sometimes does not mark most of the positive tweets as “positive”, in fact they are not marked at all. So there are the “positive” tweets, “negative” tweets, “questions” and “unknown” (or “unrated”) tweets. A quick look at these tweets and I can see many of them as good ones that should have been retweeted but they were not.
To get over this situation, I need to have an admin panel where I can see statistics and possibly “approve” the negative / unrated tweets.
Having previous experience working in Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter, I would prefer to build it in Code Igniter. I will keep this page updated with more info.
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Yes, I know what I just said that … its true because my new project HashPakistan is using Twitter Search API to get all posts with hashtag #Pakistan and last night twitter gave it results containing #ashes (and has nothing to do with Pakistan).
I noticed it today and removed those updates from the twitter timeline. Hopefully it does not happen again.
P.S. There are no official words on the Twitter Blog regarding this
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Since twitterfeed.com has not been working good for me so I started looking at alternatives and found this great post about how to do this via PHP
Twitter Down Time Rescheduled because of Iran Protests, originally uploaded by asim.zeeshan.
Twitter says “A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).
Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.”
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Yaller is one of my best DestroyTwitter theme. If you do not know about DestroyTwitter, it is a twitter client that runs on Adobe Air platform, is available for Windows and Mac alike.
Find below a screenshot of the theme when applied. (Credits to DestroyTwitter)
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Did a NASA astronaut really “tweet” from space?
That’s the question bouncing around Twitter about “Astro_Mike,” or Mike Massimino, an astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis, set to land today at Kennedy Space Center.
On May 12, Massimino wrote, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”
Ever since, NASA, newspapers, TV shows and blogs have been crediting him as the first person to post on the microblogging service, or “tweet,” while in orbit.
In reality, Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston, where a NASA employee posts them to his Twitter profile. That often takes hours because e-mails are transmitted from the shuttle only a few times a day.
Read the whole article here
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This story appeared everywhere last week (and it was not an April Fool!) A study carried out at the University of Melbourne discovered that people using the web for personal surfing get more work done than those who do not. The study was carried out by Dr Brent Coker:
People who do surf the internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.
Dr Coker states that most projects, such as writing a report, consist of mini-tasks e.g. gathering information, entering data, creating a graph, etc. Workers were shown to take small web-surfing “treats” between these mini-tasks. That enabled the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration and increased productivity.
I’m sure this news was printed and put under the nose of bosses all round the world!
Read the original post here
Although I do not have any such kind of restriction at work but I am definitely going to pass it on to my officials 
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I have just finished hosting my first OpenSource project on Google Code. Its called TwitterTweets. Its a small wrapper API that consumes Twitter REST API.
It can be easily included in any PHP script / application to support manipulation of TwitterTweets from a single user. Currently it has the following features
I will be writing and uploading modules and plugins for Joomla and WordPress in the coming days. Stay tuned.
Project Homepage: http://code.google.com/p/twittertweets
Project Discussion Group: http://groups.google.com/group/twittertweets
Enjoy!
