Developing Upwards

The aftermath of the quakes in California saw a lot of talk about Twitter getting the word spread, from the trenches, very quickly. Chris O'Brien heralded it as a sign that NextNewsRoom is doing something right. A lot of people were talking about it. Twitter carried the news before any news agency. First is one thing, but quality control is something else. The flood of messages reached a point that its almost assured no one read every quake tweet that was sent. There were just too many of them. Can anyone imagine the flood that would have been seen if Twitter existed and was popular on the morning of 9/11? It would have been maddening. We can take this situation and ask two questions. How can we form something better from the flood of tiny messages? Do we even want to? Can we find some way of filtering both relevant and "good" posts and could we pull some larger picture from all the little pieces? Of course, doing so would take resources, and those are either iron, eyes...

So, the twittersphere is in an uproar about those dropped follower counts. Is everyone more afraid of the lost high-count vanity or that so many people follow without thought that we might never regain many of the legitimate follows? Either way, there is a lot of complaining about the apparently service mishap from the company that we shell over so none of our hard earned dollars to. The mistake is one thing, but I see quite a bit of sentiment against the very method they undertook to combat the spam problem. I challenge that claim, because I think they're on the right track limiting follows, and I'm going to explain why. For Popular People This Means... You're popular by how many people follow you, not the other way around. You can go on your way, with thousands of people hanging on your every toilet flush, and Twitter can still limit those damn spammers from following you along with ten-thousand other ego filled, txt-fingered masters of the twitterverse. For "Communi...

Twitter does a lot of queuing. I mean, a lot . We know other people have a need for some good queuing, so much that Amazon even released Amazon Queue Service, not so long ago. There has never really been a common queue server, and maybe that is because its so simple that no one has really had the need to push one hard into the public eye. At least, as public as our eyes are. Enter Starling, the internal queue system of Twitter, recently released to the public. Written in Ruby, and I don't even mind! Pointed there by my ever-pointing buddy, David Novakovic, Starling does nothing absolutely remarkable, but someone has to get the light. What is interesting is their choices. Starling uses the MemCached protocol, so your clients are probably already prepared to use it, they just need to treat the queues a little different from the mappings. The typical MemCached get-operation now removes the item from the queue. The keys function is identifiers for the queues. I don't think it could...

So I haven't realized it, but my twitters from the last day or so have gone unposted. Twitter pod is great, but its completely silent about authentication errors, apparently. The root of the problem is that I have two twitter accounts: ironfroggy and pythoncoders, which I intended as an aggregator of python twitter accounts. At the very least, a place to find other pythoners on twitter. Now, I haven't been keeping up on pythoncoders, so I decided to log in and update the followings, only to realize I forgot the password. Here in lies the cause of my troubles. The twitter "reset password" form does not take a username. Oh, no, it takes an e-mail address, which I have two accounts with the same of. I crossed my fingers, went through the process, and seemed to be brought back to my ironfroggy account, so I decided to figure it out later. Somehow, this process leaves the account with an unknown password, probably random or even null, or for some reason the fact that th...