by Sujoy on November 18, 2009
This section called Twitter App reviews what is suggested in the name: The many Twitter Applications floating in and around in the internet. We discuss its functionality, its advantages and limitations if any.
The Twitter App we review this time around is Foller.Me. It is a twitter info integrator online application written by a Russian developer: Konstantin Kovshenin. He blogs at Kovshenin.com
So what is this app about? It is as simple as this. The homepage is simple and straight forward as shown in the pic above. You enter a twitter username, and it gathers and integrates all the information related to the account on a single page. Of course, the user needs to publicly publish his/her twitter feed for the application to be able to gather the information. So what kind of information is being gathered and why would it be helpful ? Find it out after the jump [Continue Reading]
Twitter is on a rampage to improve user experience not only in terms of simpler user interface and ease of using, but also by emphasising on the User Identification methods. A large portion of Twitter users are followers of their favourite celebrity tweeters [like Jonathon Ross, Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, Demi Moore - the list is endless]. Now with fame and power comes the curse of image vulnerability. For e.g. the existing Twitter account for some celebrities like famous Bollywood actor Aamir Khan and James Corden are not real. Those are fake ones, and Twitter is pushing it hard to do a check on these, so as to prevent such acts of creation of fake accounts.
In the latest blog post on Twitter, they have discussed how a certain manager, Tony La Russa has filed a lawsuit for impersonation of his name to create an account. Twitter, however has not agreed to pay any settlement for the lawsuit. To prevent occurence of any such future activities, Twitter will be rolling out identity checks termed as Verified Accounts. This check will show a tick mark next to the Profile name of a user, and will be performed on select users [comprising of public figures, officials, organisations etc.]
An important tip to check the identity of a Twitter user is to visit the URL linked in the user profile. Fake users often tend to use the Official URL of that particular user [searchable on Google]. If this particular URL links back to the twitter ID, it is certain, that the user is real and not a fake one.
Issues with this form of verification though, is that there are loads of users out there, who have shortened URLs on their profile, and these URLs lead to some dodgey website [often having an appended username at the tail] talking about affiliate marketing or money making on the internet in the next 2 hours.
In the latest post at the Twitter Blog [titled: Hello New Zealand], twitter has announced of the new-two way SMS service on Vodafone in New Zealand. So to all the Kiwis out there, here’s some Tweet Tweet Love!!!
Here is what they have to say about this.
The shortcode for Twitter in NZ is 8987 or TWTR. As always, Twittering over SMS is a standard rate message or deducted from your bundle and receiving notifications is free. If you’re not a Vodafone customer, don’t worry—we’re working on it.
Also, Twitter seems to be having their eyes now on to Australia. Happy Tweeting in the South!!
In my previous post on Twitter’s dealing with the @Reply changes and the subsequent uproar from users, I had discussed about Twitter getting a new improved version of the old @Reply settings. But yes, it is confirmed that the previous settings of seeing @Reply of users that you did not follow was not coming back.
In the latest blog post by Twitter [The Replies Kerfuffle] , they have confirmed that the old @reply settings would not be brought back due to technical reasons and they have enlisted the product design and technical problems with the functionality. And excerpt is given below.
Even though only 3% of all Twitter accounts ever changed this setting away from the default, it was causing a strain and impacting other parts of the system. Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their followers’ reply setting was and then manifest that tweet accordingly in their timeline—this was the most expensive work the database was doing and it was causing other features to degrade which lead to SMS delays, inconsistencies in following, fluctuations in direct message counts, and more. Ideally, we would redesign and rebuild this feature but there was no time, hence the sudden deploy.
For the entire post, visit the link here.
