The Phish.net API, for example, is a simple HTTP request to an endpoint that returns JSON.  If you provide a callback function name as an argument, and then pre-define that function, it will return the contents wrapped in a function call.  In short, if you define a function called “example()” that accepts JSON an array/object as an argument, then by requesting the API with a callback of “example”, the response will be returned like so:

example(json response);

The benefit, of course, is that it allows a user to embed your code easily. If you host your own callback functions, you can very easily walk a user through a data embed. For example, on Phish.net, we offer the band’s latest setlist.  So we host a callback called pnet3setlist().  Then we offer the API response.  Embedding the setlist is literally as easy as this:

<script src="http://api.phish.net/callbacks/pnet3-setlist.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="https://api.phish.net/api.json?method=pnet.shows.setlist.recent&amp;amp;callback=pnet3setlist" type="text/javascript"></script>

I’m going to dig more into this later, but the gist of this is that the API can be constructed in a way that allows novice users to interact with it in their WordPress- or Blogger-blogs with little to no modification, it allows semi-skilled users to modify it slightly and tweak it for display purposes, and it allows advanced users to control virtually all aspects. Since virtually every major web language can encode and decode JSON (Javascript, PHP, Ruby, ASP, etc), it’s a near-universal way to exchange data. It doesn’t carry the overhead or complexity of XML, nor does it have the limited scope of something like serialized PHP.

Javascript-based APIs may not be the ultimate solution to a fully interconnected web, but they’re certainly going to be one of the best and simplest methods of data exchange for the foreseeable future.

I am feeling spurned.  I used to follow my local news station, Central Florida News 13, on Twitter.  A few days ago, I realized that I wasn’t seeing their tweets anymore.  Anyone who knows Twitter knows that its performance has been a huge pile of suck lately, so I figured it was one of those Twitter bugs.  I went to their page and it was full of garbage: pages and pages of the same nonsense message.  Had they been hacked? Caught that Twitter worm?I tried to follow them about 5 times, but it wouldn’t let me.  Broken Twitter.  Nothing new.

Today I saw that they had posted a new update because someone re-tweeted it.  So I navigated over to their page and found that they had protected their updates.  I hit the button to  request to follow them, only to be greeted with the following:

What the eff? They blocked me? Why? Why would they block me?

So let me ask: in what case does it make sense for a corporation or business to block a normal user.  I must say, I am pretty upset, upset enough that I am seriously thinking that I won’t be watching channel 13, which I normally watch almost every single day, anymore. If they will single me out as someone who can no longer enjoy their service, why would I be a patron in front of my TV?

This is probably trivial and I should ignore it, but instead, I’m going to blog my new-found hatred for Central Florida News 13 and their Twitter team. Boooooooo!

So, knowing that doing so has lost them a viewer, does that make the world of Twitter a little scarier? Would people stop listening to a band, watching an actor, reading an author, if they expressed a feeling or idea with which the reader didn’t agree? Would companies feel that Twitter is safe ground knowing that tweeting the wrong thing or blocking a user could result in loss of business or audience?

Update, 4/20/09: Turns out it was – unsurprisingly – a Twitter error. I got a DM and a tweet from them, and they followed me. I can’t understand why Twitter can’t seem to get their crap together. You KNOW they aren’t getting as much traffic as Facebook. With $55 million+ in the bank, you’d think they could build the right infrastructure.

Honestly, if Facebook doesn’t introduce AJAX-y live update goodness to their homepage, I suspect I’ll use Facebook about 11% as much as I used to.

Twitter is considered a “micro-blogging” service. Like other social networks, Twitter is based on the “friend” system, and allows you to do very near real time exchange with your friends. Twitter also has an API which allows programmers to very easily write applications to extend Twitter’s functionality.  

To get up and running on Twitter, visit twitter.com and go to their signup page. You only need to provide a few bits of info and you’re ready to get tweeting.

When you “tweet,” or post to Twitter, you’ll have 140 characters to post whatever you want to say.    Most people either post their mood, what they are currently doing, some interesting news, or a link.   You should note that your tweets will be shown on the public timeline of Twitter, so everything you type is very public.  Remember that with only 140 characters, you’ll want to be concise, and if necessary, you’ll want to use shorthand.  On Twitter, abbreviations like u, 2, 4, BTW, and other text-style short codes are normal and accepted.  More on short hand in a moment.    

Your next step will be friending people.  Start by clicking on “Find People.” Twitter allows you to “follow” people, which is their concept of “friending” someone. You can import from the normal array of web services: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, and AIM. You’ll be prompted about those already on Twitter, and then given an option to invite those who aren’t. Nothing will be sent without your explicit approval. You should then move to the “Find People” tab and start typing anything that interests you. Like Starbucks? Follow them. Interesting by Fox News? They tweet. So does Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and slews of others. If you’re searching for more, try Twitterholic for suggestions.

Twitter is not an email chain. If you treat it as such, where you have to go back and read every tweet from the people you’re following, it will make you crazy. If you want to be maximize its value, you need to follow lots of people and treat it like a conversation.  When you show up to a bar, you don’t ask everyone to repeat everything they said while you were gone.  As such, follow enough people to keep a constant stream of updates coming and just pay attention to now (and maybe the very recent past).  Then you will get all sorts of interesting information from a variety of sources.  If you only follow a few people who don’t regularly tweet,  you will certainly be disappointed.

Once you’re following a selection of people, you need to start tweeting.  My first recommendation is that you use a desktop client rather than the website.  Although the website is nice, it’s a lot of work to keep checking it over and over.   There are literally dozens of very capable apps, and hundreds of not-so-glitzy ones out there, but I’ve tried several, and thus far, the best ones I’ve found are Twitterrific, Twhirl, Witty, and Tweetdeck.  I use Twitterrific on OS X and iPhone and Twhirl on Windows.  

Having a stand alone application will provide you several benefits:  firstly, you will not need to refresh any webpage.  The app will run silently in the background and as you decide to check it, you can catch up.  Most apps provide you the ability to have popups displayed when new tweets come in, and some allow popups displayed for just some people, which is my preference.   Unlike the Facebook “Live Feed,” you don’t need to check your Twitter stream this way, it will notify you when something you want to check is available.

Now you’re following people, you understand how to tweet, and you speak the basic lingo.  The last step before you’re activity tweeting is customing your profile.  Do this by clicking on “Settings.”  You should then change your picture from the default blue and brown to something more personal.  Twitter recommends a real picture, but many people use their own image.     As for backgrounds, anything is better than the default.  People are less likely to follow you if you have no picture and no custom page.  It sends the message that you don’t really care that much about your profile, and therefore, suggesting your tweets won’t be all that interesting.  

Once you’re off and running, you need to understand some Twitter-specific terms: @replies, retweets, direct messages, and #hash tags.  Though they sound insider-y, they are very easy.    When you reference another Twitter-er, you’ll want to prefix their username with an @symbol.  This will not only alert them about your message, it will also automatically link to their name.  That’s it – that’s @replying.  

When someone posts an especially good tweet, whether funny, insightful, or just something you want to share, you should “retweet” it.  You generally do this by starting your message with “RT @username <their message>.”  The RT indicates a retweet, and the @username, once again, links to their username.   Direct messages can only be sent to people who follow you and are exactly what you’d expect: non-public messages sent directly to a user.  You do this by prefixing your tweet with d and the person’s username.  For example, to direct message me, you’d type “d sethadam1 hello!”  Note that if you get confused and prefix your message with dm instead of just d, it will be entered into the public timeline.   

You should also be aware of hash tags.  By prefixing any term, such as iPhone, Orlando, Obama, etc with a pound sign, you are creating what people refer to as a hash tag.  The idea of a hash tag is that it creates a searchable term, which most Twitter clients obey, and allow you to search for other posts containing the same term.  For example, you wouldn’t necessarily use a hash before the term #vote, but you might use it for #election.  More specifically, if you went to the Macworld show, you might reference #Macworld.  

Don’t forget to shorten your links.  Since you are severely space limited, you can use URL shortening services like bit.ly, snipurl, or is.gd to crunch your long links. This is essential if you are a link re-poster.

Lastly, if you’re a blogger, you can use a service to import your blog posts into your Twitter feed automatically. Friendfeed can do this, as can Twitterfeed, which specializes in reposting your blog’s RSS feed into your Twitter stream. 

Twitter will be as enjoyable as you let it be.  If you don’t put some effort into getting up and running, it will never be an enjoyable experience.   On the other hand, if you can get past the initial steps, Twitter can be incredibly entertaining. 

First, snag your Twitter user id.  Then, open up your theme file.  I put mine in sidebar.php found in /wp-content/themes/<THEMENAME>/.    Use the below code.  If you want the output wrapped in a list, you would need to put <ul> and <li> tags around this code.

Carefully set your variables.  The cache file should be writable.  Note that you can use a decimal value for $tw_BlankAfter and $tw_Minutes if necessary.   That’s it.

Due to what must be a bug in WordPress, please ignore the closing “</text></created_at>” at the end of this post.  It’s trying be smart and “fix” broken tags, but the code is right.

NOTE (2/20/09): I have updated the below code.  The new version can be found at “Posting Your Latest Tweet in WordPress“.

/* ~~~~ Custom Twitter Bit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */
/* ~~~~ Adam S, firsttube.com, twitter @sethadam1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */
 
$tw_File = '/path/to/a/static/writable/file/twitter.html';
$tw_Userid='XXXXXXX'; //set to your Twitter user id
$tw_BlankAfter = 30; //blank out status if it's older than this many days
$tw_Minutes = 10; //minutes between reloads
 
$tw_Offset = FALSE; //leave as is
// uncomment below time if you want to allow a manual reset via ?twitter-reset
// if($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']=='twitter-reset') { $tw_Offset=0; } 
 
/* Do not edit below this line */
if(filemtime($tw_File)>time()-floatval($tw_Offset)) {
	include $tw_File;
} else {
	if(is_writable($tw_File)) { $tw_iswritable=1; }
	$tw_time = (86400*floatval($tw_BlankAfter));
	if($tw_Offset) { $tw_time=$tw_Offset; }
	$tw_hyperlinks = true;
	$tw_c = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($tw_c, CURLOPT_URL,
		"http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/"
		.intval($tw_Userid).".xml");
	curl_setopt($tw_c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$tw_src = curl_exec($tw_c);
	curl_close($tw_c);
	preg_match('/(.*)< \/created_at>/', $tw_src, $tw_d);
	if(strtotime($tw_d[1]) > time()-$tw_time) {
		preg_match('/(.*)< \/text>/', $tw_src, $tw_m);
		$tw_status = htmlentities(str_replace("&","&",$tw_m[1]));
		if( $tw_hyperlinks ) {
			$tw_status = ereg_replace(
			"[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]",
			"<a href="\">\\0</a>",
			$tw_status);
		}
		$tw_output = $tw_status;
	} else {
		if($tw_iswritable==1) {file_put_contents($tw_File,''); }
	} 
 
	if($tw_iswritable==1) { file_put_contents($tw_File,$tw_output); }
	echo $tw_output;
}
/* ~~~ /Custom Twitter Bit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */

Please note that portions of this code come from the twtter_status() function that was not written by me, but is available from various sources online.

Update: Removed function and put code inline.

Most recently, I realized that it simply stopped updating certain feeds.  One, in particular, was TUAW.  I later found that TUAW had moved their feed to Google, and were 301 redirecting requests to their RSS URL, http://tuaw.com/rss.xml.  Bloglines is supposed to follow 301s, but in this case, it just stopped updating the feed.  Other feeds has items that were clearly missing.  All of this came to a head yesterday when I was having regular troubles just getting into Bloglines at all. 

The lack of any sort of Sync API and the lack of tools being developed around Bloglines forced me to make a decision: am I going to stick to Bloglines, which has worked well for me for a long time now, or jump ship? 

Suffice it to say, I’m back on Google Reader.  The things that really annoyed me are mostly fixed: the site is much faster and smoother than before.  My only gripe is that when I click on a feed, the items must be scrolled past in order to be marked read.  I preferred the Bloglines “classic” way, which was clicking on a feed immediately marked all items as “read.”  

Anyway, we’ll see how things go with Google Reader.  You can be certain I’ll report back on the situation.

HTML shows as entities... whoops!

First of all, I am simply blown away at the “friend suggestions” that Facebook offers me. I am constantly seeing people I really do know or names I recognize. I understand it’s probably not a very complex algorithm – see who my friends have recently friended who is not on my friend list and present them to me – but you know what? – it works. And that other site is miles behind, tech-wise.

I’ve also noticed that the number of people in my age group on Facebook is seemingly tripling every day.  I can’t believe the people I’m coming across these days – people I haven’t even thought of in over a decade are cropping up regularly.  And the fact that the “mini-feed” is keeping me informed of what they do via pictures and blurbs is just genius.

There are plenty of concerns about Facebook, from their Beacon debacle to the privacy issues to the data mining they are presumably doing, but the truth is that they are providing an amazing service in the meantime.

In the past few days, I’ve had some really interesting conversations pop up on some photos I posted.  The interesting part is that these are people, in some cases, I haven’t spoken to in years, and others I still talk to, but in all cases, it feels like a mini reunion.  I get to keep up with my friends easily.  I’ve not experienced another social network that has delivered like this, for me.