Tag: twitter

Categories
Socially Inept

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ And The Future…

There’s a few things that have been swirling around inside my cavernous mind since the initial launch of Google+ which all relates to the future of social networks.

I’ve already noticed a fracture forming in the camps of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ users.  I’ve already seen the behaviour of cross posting to each and even selective posting on one or the other. In fact, I’m guilty (if it’s a crime) of doing such a thing.  And it’s happening purely based on how people behave on each network.

About a month ago I disconnected my Twitter account from auto-posting to my Facebook account.  Why? It’s simple, I got sick of the way Facebook treated my own and everybody else’s Twitter posts.  I got sick of seeing “XX More posts from Twitter.” — A link that nobody ever clicks.  All of my friends who use Twitter to post to Facebook would get bunched into one clump. And in most cases, unless you were the one single tweet (last one in) to be on top, you were likely to just get lost in the ether.   Ever since I disabled the connection and started updating my status directly on Facebook I’ve seen a much greater response to the inane things I say.

Facebook hates Twitter, that’s why they did this.  It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time Twitter updated your status directly and as such it never got grouped.  Which brings me to my next point.

Continue reading “Facebook, Twitter, Google+ And The Future…”
Categories
Coding PHP Zend Framework

The Quickest Way To Tweet via Zend Framework’s Twitter Service

This is a quick and dirty method.  It assumes a couple of things.

  1. You’ve already created your ‘app’ on twitter.
  2. You’ve already gotten your personal OAuth tokens from twitter.

First you need to setup your tokens;

$token = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access();
$token->setToken("YOUR_PERSONAL_TOKEN")
      ->setTokenSecret("YOUR_PERSONAL_SECRET");

Second, you need to setup the Zend_Service_Twitter using your access token as well as the application tokens provided by twitter.

$options = array(
 'accessToken'    => $token,
 'callbackUrl'    => 'http://' .$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. '/',
 'consumerKey'    => "YOUR_APPLICATION_KEY",
 'consumerSecret' => "YOUR_APPLICATION_SECRET");

 $twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter($options);
 $response = $twitter->status->update($message);

And that’s it.

If you want to do other things like authenticate multiple users, you’ll have to do a few other steps. Twitter was nice enough to make it “easy” for a single user to create their own app and post without any goofy intermediate authentication steps.

Categories
Randomness

Things are Changing

As some of you may know I’m now seeking full time employment.  I have had a wonderful time “off” from the hustle and bustle of every day employment over the last 18 months.  I’ve had fun doing little jobs here and there.  I’ve had fun working on my own projects.  And I’ve also had great fun traveling a bit. But really, now I need to go back to work.

I’ve updated my portfolio page a bit as well as my linked-in, monster and workopolis profiles.  Within a short period of time I’ve come had some great opportunities arise that I really hope, from the bunch, I can choose the right one.  I wish I could clone myself and take many of them.  There will be changes.  I will be working again soon.

This cryptic post is brought to you by the wind. It’s always changing.

(I’ve also updated the WP to Twitter plugin on my site to use OAuth [there, something nerdy in this post], so hopefully this gets tweeted properly.)

Categories
Coding PHP Zend Framework

All I Need is REST, Vimeo, Flickr, Zend and More

Here’s my skeleton for my magical REST interface. It’s still missing a lot of method calls for Flickr and Vimeo, but the guts are there and the remaining methods will be done in priority when I need them.  Right now it supports automatic caching and logging via simple options.

At some point I’ll probably put it on a public SVN repository, but for now you can have the tarball.  There’s a README in the file with a simple sample. And the source is pretty self explanatory so you should be able to figure it out if you want to.

The remainder of the work will be done in the order I see fit.  Likely read-only methods (most of the getters) Authentication and write methods will be much much later.

I’ll also add more RESTful interfaces as I need them.  Probably Facebook soon, Twitter later.  Who knows.

Drop your comments here if you’ve got any questions.

Categories
Coding Zend Framework

Using Zend Framework to update Twitter

I was reading a post over on Mashable about the most popular twitter clients and I found it somewhat fascinating.  As of the somewhat recent Zend Framework 1.7 release, there was a new service added. Zend_Service_Twitter  – which gave me a few ideas on what to do with my own twitter account and actually feed it some information.

One thing I’m going to do, is with the new rewrite of pileofcrap.org is to have users be able to auto-update their twitter when they post a new article or photo to their highly improved PoC Blog thing.  Thanks to Zend it’s pretty simple:

$twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter($user, $pass);
$twitter->status->update('This is my new update');

And it’s done.  Used in conjunction with tinyurl or is.gd’s APIs I can automatically do micro-updates to twitter and have all the followers of all my users automatically be notified of the new content.  It’s pretty slick, huh?

Maybe someday pileofcrap.org can be on the top client list.