Embarrassing first tweets of our time

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Whenever someone follows me on Twitter (@timdanton since you ask) I always take a look at their profile and their recent tweets to see if they’d be interesting to follow themselves. (98% of the time I decide against, especially if you’re family.)

What struck me this morning when I took a gander at someone’s Twitter feed, who’d only tweeted around 15 times, is that first tweet. The “hello world” kind of tweet of someone who doesn’t quite know what to say.

Which inspired me to take a look at the first tweets of some of the world’s most famous “tweeters”… (more…)

Twitter data demand highlights cloud control problems

Monday, January 10th, 2011

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough Data Rogering by the US Government.

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough data rogering by the US Government.

It appears that some foreign nationals are up in arms about this.

Can I say “I told you so”? For over two years, I have been raising the question of the territoriality and legal framework of data held by US companies, especially when the data is held on US territory.

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Android App of the Week: TweetDeck

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

TweetDeck’s arrival on Android has been somewhat belated. After all, it’s the most popular desktop client around, and it’s been available on iOS since June 2009. It’s my desktop client of choice, too, so I’ve been particularly keen to try out the mobile version. Better late than never, I guess.

It certainly looks like TweetDeck. The familiar shades-of-grey theme is evident here, and the mobile app borrows the column-driven format of the desktop version. Three are initially included – your main feed, your mentions and your direct messages – but more can be added, with your favourites, lists or searches available.

It’s obvious that plenty of thought has gone into the UI, too. Navigation is as simple as swiping between columns, and each is refreshed by clicking on its name at the top of the window. Click on a tweet to find options for replying, retweeting and more, and select the user to load up a full profile. (more…)

The dangers of moving home on Twitter

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

If you follow PC Pro on Twitter, you may have noticed this morning that our regular @pc_pro handle has changed to the underscore-free @pcpro.

As The Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) astutely noted, this makes PC Pro 0.8% more efficient on Twitter, which is the biggest efficiency saving we’ve made in years, but not the real reason we decided to make the move.

When we first joined Twitter in 2008, some charlatan had already laid claim to the @pcpro address and was using it to divert people to a rather shady, ad-filled website (no it wasn’t www.pcpro.co.uk, before someone makes the joke on comments). He made one tweet in two years, yet somehow accumulated hundreds of followers – doubtless people who came looking for PC Pro and blithely followed the wrong account.

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Adding your Twitter feed to your website with jQuery

Monday, September 13th, 2010

If you or your company has a Twitter account, chances are you’d like to promote it and display your latest tweets from your website. Since many websites – both personal and increasingly business – are built on blogging software such as WordPress, this is usually achieved via a plugin, of which there are many out there.

But what if you simply want to add your live Twitter feed to a “normal” web page? Twitter itself provides a number of HTML widgets, but in this article I’ll show you how easy it is to achieve with a little bit of JavaScript, CSS, and jQuery.

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15 ways to keep up with PC Pro

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The PC Pro website isn’t the only way you can keep up to date with the latest news, reviews, features and opinion from the tech world. Here are some of the many ways you can keep in touch:

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Twitter: saving democracy from the newspapers

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

It was allegedly “The Sun wot won it” in 1992, after the Tories pulled off a victory the day after the tabloid ran a front page proclaiming: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”.  (Although I faintly recall from my degree studies that more than half of The Sun readers surveyed after that infamous headline thought the newspaper supported Labour.)

The newspapers’ influence over elections has always been debatable, but what’s indisputable is that they’ve lost all control over this one. Not a single newspaper has thrown its weight behind the Liberal Democrats or Nick Clegg since his strong showing in last week’s leadership debate, but the party has seen an enormous swing in support.

The Liberal Democrats have dragged themselves level with the Conservatives and ahead of Labour in several polls, and the newspaper editors are incandescent. People are using their own minds, instead of doing as they’re told. Something has to be done.

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Cash Gordon proves Tories need Twitter lessons

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

God bless the Tories, and their attempts to be the Web 2.0 wonderkids, with WebCameron, iPhone apps and their latest digital venture – a social-media attack on the Prime Minister called Cash Gordon.

This “campaign” urges you to spread the word about the Prime Minister’s close links with the Unions (this is news, apparently), using Facebook and Twitter to spread the poison.

And just to prove they’re really living on the bleeding edge of web technology, they’ve incorporated a Twitter feed directly on the homepage that publishes any tweet – yes, any tweet – using the #cashgordon hashtag. With rather predictable results…

When will these people learn?

UPDATE AT 2:32PM: It now appears the Cash Gordon site has been redirected to a story on the Conservatives’ homepage. It seems they learn fast.

If the airport bomb tweeter’s going to jail, so should Charlie Brooker

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Charlie Brooker’s in trouble. At least if the precedent set by the police in the terror capital of Doncaster is anything to go by.

For in this morning’s Guardian, Brooker has threatened to kill a child. I read it with my own eyes in print, but in case you don’t believe me you can witness this vile death threat for yourself on The Guardian website.

And in case you can’t be bothered to scan through the article, here it is: “If I had a child like that, I’d divorce it. Or kill it. Whichever proved cheapest.”

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The dangers of Google Buzz mobile

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Google’s already come in for a skip-load of criticism over the privacy implications of its new social-networking service, Buzz. And to be fair to Google, it’s reacted pretty swiftly to some of the worst excesses.

Yet, the problems with Buzz auto-following your Gmail contacts and then announcing who they are to the rest of the internet pale into “so what?” compared to what it (and other social-networking sites) are doing on the mobile front.

The Buzz app on the iPhone, for instance, uses the phone’s GPS radio to plot your every utterance onto Google Maps. Click the Nearby button in the Buzz iPhone app, and you’ll see lots of little speech bubbles appearing all over the map, pinpointing where people are issuing their updates from.  And this isn’t only your friends or people you’re following, it’s anyone who’s using the service.

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