I’ve analysed and graphed the last 30 days of twitter activity for the #nmbs hashtag.
You can immediately see that May 26 was a ‘special’ day…

Read the post at DataConnect.be.

I just ran into the rate limiting of twitter. It hurts. 150 twitter requests an hour, at least for the search you can do more…

Have to think how to give twitter some rest inbetween my scurrying in their databases for user info… I’m gonna sleep on it.

I’m busy exploring Twitter for the moment. There will be less updates here while I’m doing that.

What am I currently using Twitter for is not to really to chat, but to find information:

• discovering new users who post interesting information (by reading those ‘close’ to me)
• via retweets and original tweets, discovering the links to interesting blogs and zines and websites
• creating lists of people who tweet about one particular thing or another (in the last few days  I have added people to ‘social media’, ‘ui-design’ and ‘marketing’
• occasionally retweeting an interesting article or tweet myself
• sometimes something funny cos I’m not a robot and it’s my account to do with as I please

So I’m actually not tweeting that much, and using it more like a work tool. However, something funny has happened the last few days – I’m being followed now by other people who are in the ‘social media’ and ‘marketing’ business.

Do you know what ? I’m thinking that Twitter is the latest refinement to finding your counterparts that are equally interested in the same subject or use the same mental gears as you do… Before that you had email, you had letters, you had clubs…

In the real world, you are constrained by your body and the bodies around you. Finding someone like-minded or like-interested was and is mostly coincidence or you need to make yourself be heard one way or another. There was a lot of chaff to go through before you found someone who thinks alike. Nowadays, with the bright siren calls of 140 character messages being thrown around, it’s easy to find someone and follow that person and another until you have a group of like-minded people around you. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. And somewhere therein lies a danger as well, methinks.

You can find me on twitter via @lexstok

I recently discovered feedparser.py, a library written by Mark Pilgrim that is amazing if you want to use python to consume rss feeds. It ‘normalizes’ the different versions of rss/atom out there into one request that you can use consistently. Doesn’t matter if it’s atom 0.1 or 0.3

A few links that are interesting together with feedparser.py as they show it’s usage:

• feedparser.org main page, which gives some examples
• Using feedparser.py to query twitter and putting those tweets on your website
• how to store rss content in a database using feedparser.py

I’m constantly amazed about the quality python code that is out there and you can just find via a simple google query. It certainly makes me think that choosing Python over, say Perl, was a good decision.

As for using feedparser.py to put relevant tweets on your website, note that you can also use javascript to achieve the same thing; go here for some twitter.com goodies and an explanation on how to set this up.

I just deleted Twitter from my iPhone – I was no longer using it to check up on my friends let alone post any new tweets.
Funny how I found it so cool in the beginning. It has certain advantages over blogging (speed, location awareness, quickly catch up with other people) but I just found it too ephemeral for my tastes.
You type a message somebody else responds but an hour later the text has already been replaced by other messages.
I need to know that what I write will stay, not evaporate – and anyway, I have facebook for posting quick status updates onto.
So goodbye twitter it was nice while it lasted.